Sprawl: A Compact History, Part I

I've started reading Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann (amazon link here). Seeing as this kind of thing is exactly (more or less!) supposed to be what this blog is about, I thought I'd blog my reading of it.

Unfortunately, I'm already halfway done with it, so my idea of blogging things from it as I get to them is out the window.

The basic aim of Bruegmann's book is to rehabilitate urban/suburban sprawl, and in the process he tries to refute as many specific ideas that people have used to attack sprawl (sprawl is unique to the US, sprawl started after World War II, sprawl is caused by cars the dependence on which is a result of a conspiracy between government and General Motors, etc.) .

Sometimes I find Bruegmann's delight in refuting a particular idea kind of off-putting, and often I don't find it as convincing as he thinks it is. He irritated me at the very beginning, when he said:

Nor do I claim that this book represents an attempt be [sic] even-handed in
treatment. Because the vast majority of what has been written about sprawl
dwells at great length on the problems of sprawl and the benefits of stopping
it, I am stressing instead the other side of the coin, that is to say the
benefits of sprawl and the problems caused by reform efforts.

In other words, he's hoping to counter propaganda with different propoganda, and he's going to pretend any actual problems with sprawl don't exist. Thanks a bundle.

Having said that, I am sympathetic to his basic project of trying to actually look at the thing itself with a more or less open mind rather than looking at it like an exterminator looks at a cockroach.

Part of the problem is definitional, which is a point Bruegmann stresses: what is sprawl, exactly, and, if you don't want sprawl, what do you want? Is everyone supposed to live in apartment buildings downtown? Are rowhouses okay? Are 8 houses per acre subdivisions built in the 1940's okay? (That would be where I live!)

Considering how many people live outside the city centers and how much economic activity occurs outside the city centers, it does seem bizarre to me that, even today, suburbs are so hated in some quarters. Actually, come to think of it, that fact that so much that used to happen in the downtowns now happens outside of them explains why they're hated, doesn't it? It doesn't explain, though, how getting rid of them is supposed to work.

Not that sprawl is necessarily suburbs (another definitional question), but they are hated by the same people and the arguments used against one are often used against the other.

So, this is basically an introduction to the book, and I plan to blog more about it as I read it. 

¶ 1/11/2006 07:52:00 AM