Home Is A And A Fire

For those only weakly committed to city living, particularly middle-class people who have serious difficulty with social diversity and who have clear housing alternatives, the "problem-free" suburbs become tempting. After an incident such as a car break-in or a bicycle theft, a "last straw" can make them leave. (249)

“Home is where the heart is.” In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops this famous statement to depict what a “home” really represents. What is a home? Is it a house with four walls and a roof, the neighborhood of kids while growing up, or a unique Cleaver household where everything is perfect and no problems arise? According to Cisneros, we all have our own home with which we identify; however, we cannot always go back to the environment we once considered our dwelling place. The home, which is characterized by who we are, and determined by how we view ourselves, is what makes every individual unique. A home is a personality, a depiction of who we are inside and

During the “Baby Boomer” era, following WWII, America underwent one of the largest demographic shifts and population growths in history. Huge amounts of home construction on the outskirts of America’s largest cities, known as “levittowns” became the new staple of the American dream, with the houses sporting two car garages, and white picket fences. These low density, predominantly middle class residential districts, were America’s first true suburbs. These suburbs were constructed mainly in response to the new postwar consumerism that enveloped the parents of the baby boomers. With the new economy, affordable housing, and most families becoming single income dependent, families grew bigger and bigger. The 1947 passing of the bill that lead to the interstate highway system, only added fuel to the fire of suburbanization. With the new interstate highway system, more affordable and fuel efficient automobiles, and the government aiding in the financing of new suburban homes, the choice seemed elementary. All of these factors pushing to the suburban movement, only spurred the baby boomers on, and between 1940-50, there was an 835% percent increase in living births with nearly 4 million children being born every year. In 1940, 19.5% of the United States population lived in what would be considered to be suburban areas outside of large metropolitan areas, however, by 1960; the number was pushing nearly 40%. The postwar suburbanization of America during the baby boomer

The concept of suburbia quickly morphed into something far different from country living. Over the years, urban sprawl has created vast suburbs. Instead of local shops, the suburbs we know today have large malls full of box stores. Highways connect our suburbs to the city center instead of railways and the modern suburb doesn 't have the same sense of community that the original suburbs had. According to the documentary, "suburban life" and everything that comes with it has been packaged and sold in bulk to many Americans and Canadians. And this package we call "The American Dream", which is simply of a mockery or a satire of what the original suburbs used to be like, is

The gentrification process can be seen through the demographic and physical changes of the South Parkdale neighborhood. Gentrification is “the invasion of working-class areas by the upper- and middle-classes, who upgrade shabby, modest housing into elegant residences, resulting in the displacement of all, or most of the original working-class occupiers”. (Lyons, 1996) South Parkdale is a neighborhood in downtown Toronto that faces problems of gentrification. This problem has been ongoing since the nineteen fifty’s’.

In the book The Prehistory of Home Jerry Moore discusses the importance that home structures have had for humans over time in different places of the world. He says that “In addition to their basic and fundamental function of providing shelter from natural elements, dwellings are powerful and complex concentrates of human existence… our dwellings reflect and shape our lives” (Moore, 3). He believes that homes are representations of the existence of individual humans as well as their surroundings. Jerry Moore is successful in explaining the importance of home in archaeology throughout history with colorful examples as well as a comparison of the importance of the home in the past to the importance of the home in the future.

Home is a dwelling where people unwind, mature, and can safely reside. Coates, Andreou, and Owen see home as a material structure and are chiefly concerned and focused on the importance of access to home. On the other hand, Shammas, Iyers, and De Botton view the abstract concept of home, which emphasizes that home, is about creating feelings and memories. Home is not a material place where it can be several different places and have no meaning. Home is a place where you create fond memories, feelings, and grow with the culture.

The word home is metaphor for the greater culture to which we belong and represents the influence of that culture on our way of thinking and acting. The sum of all of these forces then, defines who we are as individuals and serve to define what motivates us to action, our nature.

In the book The Great Inversion, author Alan Ehrenhalt reveals the changes that are happing in urban and suburban areas. Alan Ehrenhalt the former editor of Governing Magazine leads us to acknowledge that there is a shift in urban and suburban areas. This revelation comes as the poorer, diverse, city dwellers opt for the cookie cutter, shanty towns at the periphery of American cities known as the suburbs. In similar fashion the suburbanites, whom are socioeconomic advantaged, are looking to migrate into the concrete jungles, of America, to live an urban lifestyle. Also, there is a comparison drawn that recognizes the similarities of cities and their newer, more affluent,

By the 1960s many of these urban areas, with the loss of capital, jobs, and so on; began to deteriorate, and property values fell. Currently with the higher costs of property in the suburbs and other communities, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to invest small and gain a big profit; thus, making the once "undesirable" urban properties with their low property values and costs, more "desirable."

Let’s first define what are suburban, rural, and urban areas. A suburban school as opposed to an urban is a school that exists in the outer suburbs of a city. It is usually characterized by its population of middle-class white majority students whose parents have moved from the inner city areas in generations past to find open spaces or to get away from the crime ridden streets. A suburban school is still administered by the school district it is in, but because of the middle-class suburb that surrounds the school, it will generally reflect the affluence of its community.

Journalist David Owen relates that the critical suburban problem is “not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible” like the unnecessarily abundant big-box stores, the unnecessarily wide highways (built to “solve” what is often unsolvable traffic), and of course, the unnecessarily large houses (Speck 55). Reducing physical separation consequently also reduces this type of peripheral, environmentally-degrading

Throughout the world of suburbia, there seems to be a persistence of communities who attempt to create a perfect, enclosed world for the whole of the community to live in. By providing for everything that the inhabitants would ever want, suburbia is able to close itself off from those around it that it deems unworthy of belonging. While this exclusivity helps to foster the sense of community, it can also bring with it isolation from the outside, and also from within, and have disastrous results. Throughout the semester, there have been a number of works that have dealt the issue of isolation, but the greatest representation of a work whose physical qualities in its representation of suburbia help to

The word ‘home’ is something that is often misunderstood. Home makes up your identity and not many people know that. Therefore you ask me, ‘what is home?’ Home is not just in your house. Home is a place that surrounds you. It’s you environment and cause for emotions. Your home is where you are with the people that surround you (peers, family, and strangers), as well as cars, houses, stores, and/or toys.

Further, infill development can replace the unsightly sprawling that is characteristic of suburbs. It replaces the inefficiencies of subpar urban subdivision as it requires less natural resources per acre of development. The aesthetic appeal of this method is especially far-reaching. Once dilapidated structures are repurposed, they may serve as cultural points for the surrounding communities, or new, beautiful, and healthy low-cost living structures. To the investor, infill developments are not complex to build, don not require elevators and parking allocations, have better occupancy levels, and are low maintenance, leading to higher profit