Sprawl: a Compact History, Part VIII -- What Is Sprawl, Anyway?

Bruegmann on what general point he's trying to make about sprawl:

In the following chapters I will argue that the characterisitics we associate today with sprawl have actually been visible in most prosperous cities throughout history. Sprawl [...] can now be said to be the preferred settlement pattern everywhere in the world where there is a certain measure of affluence and where citizens have some choice in how they live.

This rings true to me. If given a choice, a lot (probably most, maybe even the vast majority) of people would prefer to move from their current higher population density place to some lower population density place, all other things being equal. It's true of urbanists, even. I mean, what person living in Manhattan, for instance, wouldn't really like more living space? It's a similar impulse to wanting a house without other people on the other side of all the walls, or wanting to look out from your window and not see any other signs of human habitation.

Where 150,000 people per square mile was once a standard urban density, it is rare to find densities of even 25,000 people per square mile in affluent cities today, and most urban dwellers live in densities much lower still.

Interesting. He does have a lot of good information about population density and its variations in time and space.

Bruegmann on what people mean by sprawl:

Most people don't believe that they live in sprawl. Sprawl is where other people live, the result of other people's poor choices.

Ugly but true. There may be objective reasons why sprawl is bad, but the emotional mainspring is usually "Those other people have got to stop messing stuff up I like!"

Bruegmann on the definition of sprawl:

For the purposes of trying to understand the basic urban processes that have been described as sprawl, I have chosen to define it in the most basic and objective way possible, as low-density, scattered, urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land-use planning.

(Note that "urban" is never defined! But you have a pretty solid idea of what "urban" is anyway, don't you?)

I was skeptical about this definition in this post, but I've gradually come to agree with this definition as a useful one to work with.

The fact is that it's the appearance of development in a place where it "doesn't belong" that really sets people off and it's in the areas where development is still scattered and low-density that development is going to be most visible and most likely to be denounced as sprawl.

I don't think that people really care about density as such or how scattered the development is. However, the net result of the dislike of development appearing where it "doesn't belong" is anti-sprawl sentiment, with "sprawl" defined pretty much as Bruegmann defines it.

At any rate, Bruegmann doesn't limit himself to looking at areas that fit his definition of sprawl as stated above. He says in a couple of different places that he's interested in the entire urban and urban influenced area, and how it changes over time, and what its various parts are and how they interact, etc. etc.

There is one point that I think is important, though, that I don't think Bruegmann ever really addresses. I think that some of the dislike of suburban style development is actually dislike of the physical buildings (and associated parking lots, giant signs, etc.) themselves. As I've said before, I think automobile dominated landscapes are always going to be less comfortable for people to be in than more human scaled places. There's no reason this discomfort shouldn't translate into dislike of the buildings themselves, regardless of whether the buildings can be considered invaders or not. 

¶ 1/31/2006 09:07:00 PM