+SUBURBAN REMIX [Housing and Health Resilience Framework Plan]
LUBBOCK, TEXAS / 2020 - 2021
From Housing to Health: Regenerative Suburbanism
Client
Sig Hutchinson
Design Team
Kristine Stiphany and Jason Sowell
with Brianna Deleon, Jorge Ituarte Arreola, Jesus Ruelas
Consultants
Nathan Brigmon, Tyson Watson, Jake Wegmann
HOUSING-HEALTH INTERACTIONS | FRAMEWORK PLAN | ONE SQUARE MILE | MIDDLE HOUSING | SCENARIO PLANNING
Located on the Texas High Plains, Lubbock, Texas faces the dual challenges of suburban growth and environmental concerns from major climate change. Since the 1960s, conventional suburban development has bifurcated these issues, resulting in the parallel separation of housing development that has extended the city margins, concentrated economic growth corridors to the city’s west side, and isolated health campuses to the north. Today, as middle-sized cities like Lubbock continue to grow in fragments, there is a need to rethink American suburbanism through integrated approaches to health and housing that regenerate important regional ecologies and offer places and protection for people.
This pre-land sale visioning project was commissioned by a Raleigh councilperson with a passion for urban mobility planning. It is organized around a modular middle housing model designed to remix one of Lubbock’s ubiquitous one-square-mile tracts into a health-centered community organized around a biodiverse system of micro-prairies, water management resources, and recreational parklands. A necklace of trails runs through diverse mixed-housing neighborhoods, linked to bike, public transport, and pedestrian ways that connect to a health civic commons. These micro-ecologies steward the short grass prairie, mitigate storm events, and bolster access to preventative and general wellness to all residents of Lubbock, while diverse housing types and networks of economic catalyst projects are designed to integrate intergenerational living and working in a region where such syntheses are non-existent.
The design offers a hopeful new vision for 21st-century suburban America, in addition to a detailed economic pro forma analysis that developers may use to guide investment decisions related to diverse suburban remix scenarios.
