Suburban Dallas is not a place I expected to find myself. It's not a search for who I am I am referring to. Rather it's.... Suburban Dallas is not a place I expected to find myself. It's not a search for who I am I am referring to. Rather it's this sort of awareness about where I am. Right now I am sitting above a circle that surrounds a parklet in a place called The Colony, a Dallas suburb not far from Plano, Texas.

Arriving at night and looking out the hotel window, I didn't quite know what was outside. I could see a circle, but it wasn't clear if I was looking at a tarp, parking, or a park. To my delight when the sun rose I discovered it was indeed a grassy knoll.

This particular knoll hasn't been here long, appearing sometime after my GPS map was created. It looks from the small screen as if I am driving through a field when I turn onto several of the roads here.

This knoll isn't designed as a town center as such an area would have been purposed for in 19th Century. It seems to be more of a buffer between commercial and residential areas. Sidewalks enter from the outside and spiral inward, ending at a sculpture wall and tiered area that looks as though it could be used as an amphitheater.

Across from the hotel, actually there are two hotels here, sits a large cluster of condominiums and townhomes. Behind them sit larger single-family houses. Between the houses and the hotel 90 degrees to the right are several commercial buildings, mostly unoccupied. Ninety degrees to the right are empty lots waiting for buildings of one sort or another to grow once the existing commercial spaces are filled.

Behind the hotel is a highway, elevated enough to block sight of the businesses on the opposite side. The highway is a toll road, one that can be avoided by traveling on the local roads on either side of it, in a design not unlike, but greatly expanded from, an urban boulevard.

Most of what's here hasn't been here long. Comparing it to what was built a few decades ago, it's undoubtedly an improvement. The houses built today are generally on smaller lots and closer together than they were in 1950-1990. The notion of public space, though it may be primarily a buffer has re-entered the consciousness of planners and developers. Yet the sustainability, though that word may be over-used, is suspect. Minor modifications could, in theory help The Colony become a self-sustaining community in that services could be accessed with minimal travel, but the distance from employment centers is so great and public transit non-existent, a rise in fuel prices could make living here difficult in the not-too-distant future.

We all know it's easier to build here on a blank slate than it would be to re-build the earlier suburbs closer to Dallas, yet those are the ones with the skeleton of public transit infrastructure, and the ones that logically should become more dense and walkable transit villages with access to the employment centers of Dallas and Fort Worth.

I will continue to add images to the slideshow below.