Home › News ›

It's Not Sprawl, It's Decentralization -- And It's A-OK

Posted by: David Gest

11 January 2006 - 11:00am

Robert Bruegmann's "Sprawl: A Compact History" turns typical anti-sprawl sentiment on its head.

"...Bruegmann doesn't shudder at the sight of new suburban houses displacing cornfields. Chain stores lined up like boxcars along the edge of a highway don't make him ill. Instead, he looks out over what many critics of the suburbs denounce as sprawl, and he sees a truly democratic form of living, a way to provide people at almost any economic level the pleasures that only the elite could hope for a century ago. And unlike those urbanites who figure sprawl is all the fault of our irksome American fondness for cars, Bruegmann sees the creep of new suburban fingers into the countryside as the contemporary equivalent of a movement out from cities that dates at least as far back as the ancient Romans."

Full Story: Sprawl blossoms
Source: The Chicago Tribune, January 8, 2006
»

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

This Book Is Just Playing with Words

Submitted by Charles Siegel on Wed, 01/11/2006 - 16:50.

Bruegmann makes himself sound like a daring contrarian by saying that sprawl dates back at least to Roman times and is needed to get people out of dense, industrial cities. Actually, he is just playing with words by using "sprawl" to mean "suburb."

The term "suburban sprawl" was invented during the 1950s to describe post-war American suburbs, which were different from earlier suburbs in obvious ways. Sprawl was much lower density than earlier suburbs. Sprawl made it impossible for people to walk, because it was designed with a discontinuous street system (large arterial streets and local streets are either indirect or cul-de-sacs). Sprawl was designed purely for the benefit of automobiles and ignored the pedestrian; no one wants to walk around a strip mall.

If Bruegmann contrasted sprawl with the streetcar suburbs that were popular in American cities before World War I, it would be obvious that the streetcar suburbs provide all the benefits of sprawl without many of the costs.

Streetcar suburbs let people get out of congested industrial cities to greener neighborhoods where they can own their own homes. They let people at every economic live in the way that the elite used to live. They are at least as livable as sprawl.

But streetcar suburbs use less than half as much land as sprawl suburbs. They have continuous street systems that allow people to walk. They are designed for pedestrians as well as for cars, with shopping on walkable Main Streets instead of in strip malls.

Bruegmann makes the false claim that people move to sprawl suburbs as a matter of free choice.

In reality, the federal government has given most transportation funding to freeways over the last fifty years, so most Americans do not have the choice of living in walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods.

In reality, also, most localities in the United States have zoning laws that require you to build sprawl. New Urbanists who have been trying to build modern versions of streetcar suburbs find that the zoning laws get in their way, that they have to go through endless hoops to build a suburb that is not sprawl. They have called for "zoning choice" to give developers the option of building sprawl or building streetcar suburbs -- and Wisconsin has enacted such a law.

Let's allow people real democratic choice -- including more transportation choice and the choice of living in suburbs that are not sprawl.

Charles Siegel

Bookmark and Share
“
It has been estimated that half of all Americans, and two-thirds of urban Americans, live in suburbia. Here are the key questions: Does suburbia exist because it is the natural "culmination of urban development"?
”