Sprawl III: Introduction

So, I've discovered that I can read considerably faster than I can write about what I'm reading. I finished actually reading the book a couple of days ago (it's not really a very big book), but there's much more blogging to be done yet. It will be interesting to see if this set of posts is in any way coherent when looked at as a group.

So, Bruegmann's Introduction:

Naturally, this is the place for high level examinations of sprawl and other related topics. Early on, Bruegmann gives what he calls the most common definition of sprawl:

unplanned, scattered, low-density, automobile-dependent development at the
urban periphery

I'm not so sure this is what most people mean by sprawl. Or, rather, there's a couple of different kinds of sprawl, or a couple of different things that people see and then call "sprawl".

One kind of sprawl is where suburban/urban things show up in a rural area. The classic example from my own experience is the new subdivision surrounded by working or recently working cornfields. The key here is that the overall landscape is still rural, and the suburban/urban things are seen as invaders.

(Incidentally, you can get something very similar when suburban things show up in the city. For instance, at the moment, a big box shopping center development anchored by Wal-Mart is going up in the city of Cleveland, in an area that formerly held part of the LTV/ISG/Mittal steel plant. There are various reasons people object to this development, but I think a partial driver for some people at least is the mere appearance of this prototypical suburban/rural form in the heart of Cleveland's industrial zone. It seems like an invader, too, just like a subdivision surrounded by cornfields.)

The second kind of sprawl, in my reckoning, is the kind where a large area is entirely (or almost entirely) covered with suburban style buildings, particularly shopping centers and office parks and other building forms that are more or less dominated by parking lots ( as opposed to large areas of single family homes, which I don't think seem as oppressive, no matter how large an area they cover). Driving around in one of these places for a couple of hours (doing multiple errands, doing serious shopping, whatever) is enough to convince anyone that something is seriously out of whack, I think, especially if the traffic is bad, which it often is.

I think Bruegmann's "unplanned, scattered, low-density, automobile-dependent development at the urban periphery" definition covers the first type of sprawl (which I'll call "exurban sprawl" for convenience), but it doesn't really cover the second (which I'll call "suburban sprawl"), and I think the second type may actually be more important than the first. Exurban sprawl mainly bugs the people who lived there before the newcomers arrived -- the newcomers themselves think everything is fine. But suburban sprawl can bother even the people who deliberately move into it, let alone the people who remember what was there before.

I think what differentiates what I call "suburban sprawl" from an actual city is the total subordination of the landscape and the buildings to the needs of cars. A suburban sprawl area may not really be that much less dense than a city, and a city may represent an even more thorough triumph of the built environment over nature, but in a city, the buildings dominate the cars, and in a suburban sprawl area, the cars (and the roadways, and the parking lots) dominate both the buildings and the people. No matter how big the building, a building is still more on human scale than a parking lot is, because a building is meant for use by people, and a parking lot is meant for use by cars. I think this "not on human scale" effect may be what drives a lot of the dislike that people have for these suburban sprawl areas.

To be fair to Bruegmann, he mentions the multiple definitions of sprawl several times in the book, and he sees the very fuzziness of the definition as a benefit to anti-sprawl forces, because it maximizes the number of people who want to stop sprawl without forcing them to actually agree on a definition. But he never picks up on what I call "suburban sprawl" as being something that people object to, and instead he refutes the objections people express to "unplanned, scattered, low-density, automobile-dependent development", which I think are less significant objections overall. 

¶ 1/18/2006 09:20:00 PM