ELSEVIER Landscape and Urban Planning 36 (1997) 301-313 LANDSCAPE AND URBAN PLANNING Retrofitting suburbia. Open space in Bellevue, Washington, USA. Cynthia L. Girling, Kenneth I. Helphand Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA i Abstract This paper traces the maturation of Bellevue's urban pattern with particular attention to open spaces and stormwater drainage. Several significant events set the current course and led to a new interpretation of the city-country continuum. The seemingly conventional suburban values of this community led the citizens to oppose dispersed commercial development and re-focus the community's development energies on the downtown. More recently, re-zoning of the downtown area, development incentives and design guidelines have been leading to a re-invention of downtown following urban village models. The community resisted burdening itself with the exorbitant costs of engineered drainage systems and gambled on a surface drainage system. In 1974 Bellevue adopted a surface drainage system originally out of financial imperative, placing it at the forefront of innovative stormwater management. Working cooperatively, stormwater engineers and parks planners are weaving a complex web of public open space that integrates the utilitarian public corridors of the city with older patches of park land. The maturing of Bellevue represents a new constellation of values and evolving settlement patterns for the old suburbs. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Suburbs ; Open space; Stormwater 1. Introduction Half of American now dwells in suburbs, but what do Mount Vernon, New York, Schaumberg, Illinois, Aurora, Colorado, or Bellevue, Washington have in common? Suburbs are more than addresses. They represent, in physical form, the enactment of cultural ideals, embodying philosophies and images of what constitutes the good life (Tuan, 1986). In the marketplace, they are the collective preferences of home buyers, who are purchasing both dwellings and a way of life. All suburbs lie along a spectrum between the worlds of city and country. Occupying this broad middle ground complicates matters of definition. Each suburb, in its distinctive fashion, Tel.: 541-346-3641 or 346-1454; Fax: 541-346-3626. combines aspects of the city, with its urbanity, con- venience and energies, with aspects of an idealized nature, its beauty, physical elements and the psycho- logical distance it affords from people and the world of human affairs and artifice. This nature is not wilderness, but the rural landscape of agricultural countryside, small town and village life. At a deep level, suburbs combine the dual ideals of a pastoral longing for an idealized past associated with the natural world with a hoped for future associated with the progressive, technological promise of the city. (Girling and Helphand, 1994) As post World War II suburbia matures, it is being slowly reconceived and reconfigured. In this process, ideas, inspiration and models are sought by those who plan, design, and build communities. They are all looking to the lessons of the suburban past 0169-2046/97/$17.00 Copyright © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII S0169-2046(96)00361- I