I found this item in the Wall Street Journal to be particularly interesting. While urban and especially suburban property values have plummeted,

the average residential sale price climbed 7% last year from 2006 levels, before the recession began. This year, says the firm, based in Kansas City, Mo., prices are expected to be up 2% from 2006. That's compared to an expected 22% median price decline nationally in existing single-family homes in 2009 from 2006 levels.

So now more people are moving out of cities and suburbs and heading for the country, or at least the exurban fringes, what Leo Marx would call "ruburbia."¹ Being a ruburban myself, and perhaps what this article might consider a second generation 'ruralpolitan', it's not surprising at all that city-folk would turn to the country in an economic downturn. Here the city is seen as the site of economic instability and unpredictability, and the countryside, as always, its antidote. This deep-seated anti-urbanism is congenital to American development, and the desire to be both outside the city yet connected to its commercial and social benefits is fundamental to the history of sprawl–and, indeed, suburbia in general. For me, then, this is just a further development of centrifugal growth, and, more broadly, another iteration of the tradition, from Jefferson's gentleman-farmer-citizen to Wright's Broadacre City, of binding political hope to the landscape.

With the possibilities of the internet and 'online commuting,' now even the most rural community can be, effectively, a bedroom community. What's worrying is that these displaced suburbanites aren't likely to drastically alter their lifestyles to suit their new environments; most importantly, they aren't likely to give up their dependence on the car. If anything, moving to the country aggravates one's reliance on the car in daily life. The supermarket, instead of being four or five miles away, is now ten or twenty. School is thirty; work, in this article's example, is sixty. Any sort of community thought to be found or made, as opposed to the anonymity of the city, will be stretched to its physical limits. While this certainly seems like a fleeting trend (the move to the city being one of the more inescapable forces of the modern age), it's not hard to see that, if combined with the small town nostalgia-mongering of the worst of the New Urbanists, it could prove to be a significant real estate development or even planning trend.

[1] see Leo Marx, "The American Ideology of Space" in Denatured Visions

Also:

He and his nine-year-old, James, decided to try killing one—"My wife didn't want anything to do with that," he says—and cooking it. It turns out that roosters can be tough. "We took one bite and it was like, 'We can't eat this thing,' " says Mr. Dawley.

Isn't that why you cook it for like a whole day in red wine and make coq au vin? C'mon now people.

So even though I'm officially on charrette for my fall semester studio project, I'm utterly preoccupied by my thesis paper. Although I had a fairly complete outline nearly three weeks ago, I've been restructuring the paper continually. Here's the basic format, shown with the quotes at the heart of the research for each point:

I. Life on the Edge of the City

On the fringe of mass Suburbia, even the advantages of the primary neighborhood group disappear. The cost of this detachment in space from other men is out of all proportion to its supposed benefits. The end product in an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set. [...] Those who accept this existence might as well be encased in a rocket hurtling through space, so narrow are their choices, so limited and deficient their permitted responses. Here indeed we find ‘The Lonely Crowd.’
Lewis Mumford, The City in History

II. Publicity and Everyday Life

We do not, after all, experience the city blankly, and much of what we do absorb from daily life in the city (be it the long drag of the commute, the jostle of the subway crowds, the blandness of the shopping mall, the elegance or grandeur of certain forms of urban architecture, the panhandlers on the sidewalk, or the peace and beauty of an urban park) surely has some kind of influence on how we are situated in the world and how we think and act politely within it.
David Harvey, The Political Economy of Public Space

[...] these spaces are like everyday life: 'trivial, obvious but invisible, everywhere and nowhere.' For most Angelenos, such spaces constitute an everyday reality of infinitely recurring commuting routes and trips to the supermarket, dry cleaner, or video store. The sites for multiple social and economic transactions, these mundane places serve as primary intersections between the individual and the city. [...] This realm of public life lies outside the domain of electoral politics or professional design [...] Unlike normative public spaces, which produce the existing ideology, these spaces help to overturn the status quo.
Margaret Crawford, Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life

III. Modernity and Mobility

La ville qui dispose de la vitesse dispose du succès.
Le Corbusier, Urbanisme

One could achieve speed not by concentrating but by fragmenting the urban, opening up the dense fabric to allow the automobile to run free, exploding the city in fragments over whole regions. With urban functions no longer confined within the dense environment of the central city, homes, factories, offices, and stores could spread out and merge with the landscape. Here potentially was a new synthesis of speed and space unknown to urban history.
Robert Fishman, Beyond Sprawl

IV. Density and Democracy

The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors–differences that often go far deeper than differences in color–which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The only indispensible material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them, and the foundation of cities, which as city-states have remained paradigmatic for all Western political organization, is therefore indeed the most important material prerequisite for power.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

V. Toward Public Space as Resistance

It is here, perhaps, with the potential of physical space for sustaining face-to-face, confrontational discussion and debate, that the architect resurfaces as an agent who still has some marginal critical relevance in the late-modern world. How else, other than by providing a provocative public micro-realm, can the architectural profession significantly intervene in the universal megalopolis?
Kenneth Frampton, Land Settlement, Architecture, and the Eclipse of the Public Realm

I've got two weeks to pull this thing together.