Martin's Chapel Grove

My name is Thomas Rowe and I grew up in Lawrenceville, Georgia in a suburban sprawl based neighborhood, Martin's Chapel Grove (who exactly Martin is, is anybody's guess), with a similar layout to the photo on page 5 of Suburban Nation, with roads surrounding around a central block of houses with more houses running on both sides of the street with a couple of exits to leave the neighborhood.

My family moved into this neighborhood when it was just created about eight years or so ago, when the shape of the hilled landscape was clearly visible, but when more and more houses were built, those houses became our only view from the front of our house with the thin wall of trees behind us seperating our neighborhood from busy roads. Since the sloped landscape and small size of the neighborhood could not provide a recreational center with a pool or a tennis court, most of the children had to travel to the homes of others to play basketball in the street or have the occasional bike race down some of the hills.

The ranch-styled houses in that neighborhood were the definition of "cookie cutter" houses, every house looked like the one next to it which looked like the one next to it, with the exception of an extended porch every other house or an additional floor every twenty houses or so. The picture below (courtesy of Google Maps Street View) shows the house I used to live in to the far right and its copies within view.










Although my neighborhood was fairly diverse in terms of age and ethnicity most families shared a common income level but keep to themselves mostly. Of course the children were more outgoing and willing to walk house to house to interact with others, but the adults keep rather private lives except for the occasional chat with the neighbors while mowing the lawn, which lead to a sense of no deep community relationship that traditional neighborhoods foster.

This neighborhood was solely used for residential space and made the residents drive a good ten minutes away to a shopping center with a pizza place, dry cleaning, gas station, chinese restaurant, and a grocery store. The sidewalks ended as the neighborhood did so walking was never an option for leaving the neighborhood, and the busy roads and awkward intersections made biking anywhere near impossible. The diagram on page 23 of Suburban Nation illustrates the jist of this situation where a "collector" road attracts all the traffic making driving a necessity and the only feasible method of transportation to the distant shopping centers.

My neighborhood supports the idea of suburban sprawl as "bad" growth in terms of building lasting relationships and a strong sense of community, because if more neighborhoods like mine sprout up faster than traditional neighborhoods can develop, then more and more citizens would grow up without a closeness to their neighbors and miss out on a chance to form lasting community ties with one another which are lost in the seperation associated with sprawl. My neighborhood was livable but on an individual family stand point because only inside our house did we feel a sense of closeness but there were hardly any ties between the families in the neighborhood. One way to improve sprawl neighborhoods like mine to make them more livable would be to centralize neighborhood involvement through social events for all age groups to strengthen bonds to one another.