This article from The Smithsonian presents some ideas on the future of suburbia.

With truly autonomous vehicles still years away, no one can say with much certainty if they will result in people spending less time in cars. But Berger does foresee one big potential benefit—much less pavement. Based on the notion that there likely will be more car-sharing and less need for multiple lanes since vehicles could continuously loop on a single track, Berger believes the amount of pavement in a suburb of the future could be cut in half. You would no longer need huge shopping center parking lots, or even driveways and garages.

Not only would fewer paved surfaces increase the amount of space that could be used for carbon-storing trees and plants, but it also would allow more water to be absorbed and reduce the risk of flooding in cities downstream.

That kind of interdependence between suburbs and downtowns is at the heart of how Berger and others at the CAU see the future. Instead of bedroom communities of cul-de-sacs and shopping malls, the suburbs they’ve imagined would focus on using more of their space to sustain themselves and nearby urban centers—whether it’s by providing energy through solar panel micro-grids or using more of the land to grow food and store water.

I almost liked the article until I got to the Joel Kotkin quote:

“The reality is that the large majority of people want to live in suburbs,” says Joel Kotkin, a fellow of urban studies at Chapman University in California and the author of The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. “People make these choices for all kinds of reasons that urban theorists don’t pay attention to. They’d rather live in a detached house than in an apartment building. Or they can’t afford to live in the middle of a city. Or they’re worried about where their kids will go to school.”

It’s a scare tactic. Yes, dictators of the past may have forced people into high rise housing blocks at gunpoint in a few cases. That is not happening in the United States right now. In fact, most of us are not able to make a choice between car-dependent and walkable communities because walkable communities are in short supply. Things that are in short supply and high demand tend to be expensive. They are expensive because they are desirable and limited, not because they are undesirable and people are being forced to live there against their will. The nascent trend toward city living would have to continue for a long, long time before there is any lack of suburbs to choose from.

I can’t deny that the state of many urban school districts is problematic. Schools in the United States tend to be locally funded, so that areas with higher concentrations of poverty have worse schools. And areas with higher concentrations of minorities have worse schools because racist and ideologically anti-city politicians from rural areas are able to starve them of funding in many states. All this leads to a downward spiral of poor outcomes and low expectations that is hard to break out of.