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

"...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."