Sprawl: A Compact History

University of Chicago Press

2005

Sprawl: A Compact History, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize.

In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful.

The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers a completely new vision of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that “in its immense complexity and constant change, the city—whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawling in suburbia, or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles—is the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind.”

REVIEWS

Jacqueline Tatom

Journal of Architectural Education

2006

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Robert Bruegmann’s new book, Sprawl: A Compact History, is a passionate call for rewriting the history of the great urban regions that are today’s cities and that dismay so many urban professionals and scholars. His acute sensitivity to the formal and social nuance of the sprawling urbanism of Los Angeles and New York that frame this history and his quiet plea for tolerance in the final paragraphs of an otherwise combative text, betray his love of these cities, unhampered by distaste for their imperfections, outrage over their real failings, or desires to reform the beloved. This kind of love of cities, sprawl and all, is rare in American urban scholarship. Cannons of causality are turned on their head in this work, tried and true criticisms swept aside, and the familiar steps of ideal makeovers dismissed. Bruegmann intends to rehabilitate this most extraordinary of human artifacts to provoke us into accepting its complexity and humanity, with eyes unclouded by preconceptions of beauty.

This is a tall order yet Bruegmann makes short shrift of it by tackling what smart growth proponents perceive as its major failing, the fact that when it grows, it sprawls. In a truly compact three hundred pages including notes, he provides a history of sprawl from Rome to the present, from Europe to North America, and from eighteenth-century poets to today’s antisprawl advocates. His scope is narrow; he hews closely to the debate’s central preoccupation with demographic density and settlement dispersal, presenting graphs plotting relationships between demographic, physical, and economic expansion of cities. He makes no pretense of being even-handed in his account of the debates or his rejection of the widespread consensus of urban malaise and dysfunction.

For Bruegmann, sprawl is really another word for the inevitable process of urban expansion in the wake of the increasing prosperity and democratization of societies. It occurs differentially in time and space, according to density gradients closely linked to economic affluence. The slope from center to periphery, from high density to low density, is very steep in traditional or nineteenth-century cities; it has flattened considerably over time. According to Bruegmann, this is caused not by cultural predilection, racism, government highway financing, fiscal policy, or even greedy developers in cahoots with local governments but by the natural desire of individuals and households in increasingly democratic and wealthy societies to accede to the privacy, mobility, and choice that have long been the prerogative of the very wealthy. A mix of rhetorical arguments and data drawn from a broad range of studies support this claim.

Bruegmann also provides a history of how sprawl the process has been conceptualized as sprawl the problem. He documents how each generation’s professional and cultural leaders have formulated antisprawl agendas, in different guises, becoming most vociferous during cycles of economic expansion that fuel what is perceived as intractable growth. He argues that historically, efforts to contain that expansion either fail or generate unintended consequences that often produce even worse situations of inequity and inefficiency.

Critics of this book will likely attack the scholarship, which might be too broad, cross-disciplinary, and heavily weighed with geographic and urban policy references for their taste. Scholars who are used to parsing urban data will closely review and perhaps challenge the graphs of density gradients on which many of Bruegmann’s assertions rely. Others will chafe at the tone, which in many paragraphs is as scathing and provocative as any antisprawl treatise. Many who agree that there is no one single cause for sprawl and that the designated culprits may have a far smaller role than generally asserted will nonetheless regret that the option ‘‘all of the above’’ is equally dismissed. Some will note that he talks little of the problem of inner city minority populations although he lobbies for the inclusion of central city disinvestment and gentrification as essential variables in the sprawl equation.

Sprawl is nonetheless a necessary and welcome reminder of the potential sterility that can emerge from a rational problematization that essentializes urban form and relies on evermore controls over use and boundaries and, ultimately, individual choice. Winners and losers are unfairly created without redressing fundamental injustices and with implicit aesthetic judgment. Below the surface of Bruegmann’s polemical stance in defense of the messiness, uncertainty, and complex unpredictability of cities is a real impatience with the urbanist’s private vices of aesthetic and behavioral control masquerading as public good. Are compact settlements, growth boundaries, public transportation, and architectural codes really essential to ensure that all infants born in cities will have an equal opportunity to health and education, economic opportunity, and shelter and clean air and water? Bruegmann argues maybe not.

So what is an urbanist to do? For clearly, this keen observer sees that the wonderful city is not equally wonderful for all, whether it is growing smartly or sprawling unchecked. Like all historians, Bruegmann brings us through time masterfully and concludes that the lessons of history suggest that we need a little of this and a lot of that and sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. He then leaves us to our confusion. But he has provoked us out of our complacency and reminded us that entangled as we are in the debates about how to fix the city, we should not forget to what end and for whom.

Jacqueline Tatom is an assistant professor at Washington University’s School of Architecture where her research focuses on the urbanizing periphery of American metropolitan areas and their deurbanizing centers.

Richard Harris

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2006

2006

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Reviewed by Richard Harris, School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Peter O. Muller, Book Review Editor

This is a book that a geographer should have written. Scholarly, yet accessible to a wide audience, it treats an important subject that is both controversial and inherently spatial. Conventionally enough, its author, Robert Bruegmann, defines sprawl in terms of low residential density and geographic scatter. Much less conventionally he concludes that it is ‘‘the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind’’ (p. 225). Sprawl, the book, does not quite sustain that extravagant claim, but it does provide a systematic, persuasive, and—given the brevity of the text—surprisingly exhaustive defense of its subject.

A historian, Bruegmann encourages readers to step back in order to gain a perspective on modern American conditions—back in several dimensions. Rhetorically, he gives us the view from above. He draws us in to his narrative by describing the changing scene from a plane window as we make the long descent into New York’s La Guardia; at the end he draws us back with a dusk departure from Los Angeles where, after more than fifteen minutes at 400 miles an hour, the lights end abruptly at the line of the desert beyond Palm Springs.

Substantively, Bruegmann takes us back in time. In the first section of his book he argues that, far from being an originally or uniquely American phenomenon, sprawl is almost as old as the city itself. This claim undercuts the popular assumption that scattered fringe development is a response to conditions peculiar to (or taking an extreme form in) the United States, whether white flight, anti-urbanism, unrestrained capitalism, automobile ownership, or state support for highways and home ownership. Instead he claims that, everywhere, sprawl has been a product of affluence and democracy. In the second section he shows that the recent international campaign against sprawl, which gathered momentum during the 1990s, had precursors in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, and in Britain during the interwar years. He discusses the criticisms that have most commonly been leveled at sprawl: that it costs too much, that it exacerbates social disparities and problems, threatens local and global environments, and is often plain ugly. Conceding some aspects of some of these points, he probes the motives of anti-sprawl critics, suggesting that (unconsciously, or cynically) they have disguised their desire to preserve and enhance social privilege behind the language of infrastructure costs and environmental stewardship. Here he makes good use of Michael Poulton’s concept of the ‘‘incumbent’s club’’: the group of people who benefit from an amenity and who join together to limit access to it.

A widening geographical perspective emerges most clearly in the third section, where Bruegmann sketches the remedies that planners have offered for sprawl. The focus remains on the United States and he discusses at length the goals and, in his view, dubious achievements of regulatory initiatives, notably in the Portland, Oregon, area. Before doing so, however, he surveys various European planning endeavors since the 1940s, including London’s greenbelt, France’s Grand Ensembles (and other European equivalents), Stockholm’s planned suburbs, and Moscow’s modernist, apartment-flanked boulevards. His conclusion is that only the most authoritarian of regimes has been able to stem sprawl, and even then only temporarily. This comparative frame of reference is rare in the U.S. literature and adds greatly to the weight of the argument.

Also adding weight is Bruegmann’s command of an extensive literature. Not only does he cite an impressive array of published materials but his endnotes show that he has made judicious selections from more extensive bodies of literature. I am not familiar with all of these, but among the modern historical material I could detect only a couple of notable omissions: his discussion of the history of exurbia neglects the interwar trend toward part-time farming and also appears to omit reference to John Stilgoe’s Borderland (1988). (Since there is no comprehensive, alphabetic list of references I may have overlooked the latter.) But these are quibbles. The book has been fifteen years in the making; ironically compact, it is a distillation or reduction sauce.

Underlying Bruegmann’s argument is the belief that debates about sprawl have never hinged on the use of objective, quantitative data. Social and aesthetic criteria, he suggests, have framed prejudices and guided inquiry. Appropriately, then, he relies on his own fieldwork or, as he puts it, ‘‘going out and looking around.’’ In this he has been influenced by cultural geographers such as Peirce Lewis, whose description of the modern ‘‘galactic metropolis’’ Bruegmann cites (p. 94) with particular approval. Evidently he usually packs a camera, and the text is carefully illustrated with his own, well-captioned illustrations of sprawl from Virginia to Paris, and even Bangkok. But although Bruegmann is an art historian, he offers far more than an impressionistic or esthetic assessment. He has pored over census data and constructed density gradients to good effect. Some of his more telling findings concern the recent decline of central densities in such urban places as central Paris, coupled with the rise in suburban densities in such sprawling metropoles as Los Angeles and Phoenix. His point here is that national differences are fading, but that sprawl may have a limit.

Sprawl is contrarian and almost everyone will find something to disagree with. I myself am skeptical of Bruegmann’s assumption that sprawl, and the movement against it, experienced much of a dip in the early 1970s. Reaching farther back in time, however, I think he overstates the historical continuities between past and present: as he himself concedes (pp. 18, 43), the mass sprawl of the postwar era has involved an unprecedented proportion of the population and operated at an unprecedented scale. Then, too, his explanation of sprawl appears to assume that most (though not all) people everywhere would live at low residential densities if they only could. He may be right, and he does provide anecdotal evidence to support the claim, but in an era when we have become hypersensitive to cultural differences this sort of argument needs to be made more fully.

Sprawl is not the first defense of dispersed urban settlement. Indeed, as Bruegmann indicates, there has been an anti-sprawl backlash in the past several years. Joel Garreau’s Edge City (1991) was a partial harbinger and (I suspect) inspiration for this trend. But Sprawl is the most comprehensive and, in the end, most reasonable statement of this point of view. To be sure, Bruegmann is frank about his bias. Noting that most of what has been written about suburban development and sprawl has been critical, he frankly claims not to be evenhanded: ‘‘I am stressing instead the other side of the coin’’ (p. 11). In general that is true. He mounts a systematic campaign, probing every argument against sprawl for signs of weakness. He uses the text to sketch his general case, reserving trench warfare for the endnotes, which can sometimes be read as a parallel text. But if Bruegmann is impassioned he is also careful and fair-minded. On many occasions he concedes that specific criticisms of sprawl do have a point, and this is especially true on the environmental front.

Most notably, Bruegmann manages to navigate some difficult ideological shoals. Those who have tried to defend weakly regulated fringe development have been drawn disproportionately from the conservative end of the political spectrum. Their argument has been that governments have done more harm than good and that markets should be left to take care of the issue. Following the example of only a few other writers, notably the Australian urbanist Pat Troy, Bruegmann develops a critique that does not fit easily into this, or indeed any, ideological framework. Sprawl, then, may serve a polemical purpose but it accomplishes far more. Subtle and well-informed, it mounts a sustained critique of a set of assumptions and arguments that dominate public and academic debate. For anyone with an interest in, or a practical engagement with, urban development issues Sprawl is indispensable reading.

Key Words: metropolitan growth, sprawl, United States, urban history.

References

Garreau, Joel. 1991. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday.

Stilgoe, John. 1988. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb 1820–1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(3), 2006, pp. 666–686 r 2006 by Association of American Geographers

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.

Andrew Ross

Harvard Design Magazine

2006

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Andrew Ross, Review of Sprawl: A Compact History and Dolores Hayden, A Field Guide to Sprawl

Robert Bruegmann has performed a rare feat by writing a book about sprawl in which nobody has bad intentions. The usual suspects (venal developers, pushy lenders, road and housing lobbies, big-box retailers, traffic engineers) are cleared of all charges and sent back to continue their work — plowing under farmland and spitting up cookie-cutter subdivisions. In his book, the landscape of sprawl may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it is the people’s choice, and anti-sprawl advocates who believe that ordinary people don’t generally make the best choices will have to suck it up.

While there are no villains in his book, Bruegmann works so strenuously to correct what he sees as “the balance of opinion” on sprawl that it is the critics of unplanned, low-density, suburban development who emerge as misguided and dangerous. Whether because of their arch contempt for lower-middle-class taste or their zeal in protecting their own interests as members of an “incumbents’ club,” they are generally portrayed as rank alarmists, pushing a cause that is way out of sync with reality.

In Bruegmann’s world, the remedies they promote — smart growth, high-density settlement, green belts, highway suppression, urban growth boundaries — may do more harm than good.

Their passion for moralizing is undemocratic; sprawl is always only where other people live, and these people are undisciplined, imprudent, and gauche. And the critics play fast and loose with the facts, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rate of sprawl, far from accelerating at a disturbing pace, has been on the decline for the last few decades.

This last claim is the evidentiary core of Bruegmann’s voluminous survey, and it deserves more attention than his effort to pick fights with the anti-sprawl brigades. With the aid of density gradient charts (drawn up, as are most of the book’s data graphics, by Dennis McClendon, a fearless combatant in the planning profession’s sprawl wars), Bruegmann argues that the rate of urban decentralization peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has been slowing ever since. In almost half of the country’s large cities — many with highly permissive land-use regulations — densities have been rising for some time now. In one counterintuitive leap, the much-maligned Los Angeles basin is revealed to be the densest metro region in the U.S.: it has always had small lot sizes, and its residential ground coverage is quite comprehensive.

Permissive cities like Phoenix and Houston have done a good job, in Bruegmann’s view, of accommodating the poor and minorities. By contrast, he takes some pleasure in portraying smart growth strongholds like Portland and Nantucket as high-priced, racially exclusive bastions of privilege, choc-a-bloc with regulations that most liberty-loving Americans would reject out of hand.

Some of the factors cited for the flattening of the gradients are center city repopulation, the proliferation of row houses and multifamily apartments in the rings of suburbia, and the development of infill pockets that the first wave of suburbanization leapt over. These are all verifiable details and indeed might well be interpreted as successes of smart growth thinking. But Bruegmann has a more abstract and ultimately far-fetched explanation for the flattening. Sprawl, which, he observes, has been around “since time immemorial,” is a natural product of affluence and urban maturation. The vast majority of the human populace, he believes (though there is no way of verifying this truism), would prefer to live in single-family, detached housing on a decent-sized lot, and so they pursue that desire whenever and wherever they are able to afford to do so. Sprawl is the unsavory label unfairly bestowed on this settlement pattern when it attracts a critical mass of the population.

So how does Bruegmann explain the more recent shift toward densification? He speculates that it may be evidence of a society passing from an affluent to a super-affluent stage, when citizens can afford to act on their concerns about environmental quality. In fact, the heightened concern about sprawl in recent years is evidence that we are living in boom times, with ever-rising expectations. Things are so good, Bruegmann muses, that folks have to find new problems to worry about.

News about these happy-go-lucky times must have been slow to reach me. In the years that correspond to the flattening of his density gradient, the average wage of U.S. workers has not risen at all, and the rate of class polarization has been more dramatic than in any other period of history. By any socioeconomic measure, the stagnation of the American standard of living and the rapid erosion of its famous middle class are hardly evidence of a super-affluent society. Rather, the crystal clear profile is one of a radical redistribution of wealth upwards. What the rich beneficiaries of this redistribution do with their housing choice — consolidate their luxury quartering in cities and carve out compounds in exurban retreat — hardly registers at all on the maps central to Bruegmann’s speculations. After all, the most bourgeois urban enclaves were barely affected by population flight in the postwar era, and so they hardly required the attention of gentrifiers in the period of urban revitalization that followed. As for exurban settlement, it appears to fall outside the definition of sprawl that Bruegmann finds useful. In any case, as he rightly points out, there is little hard data on the repopulation of rural areas by the nouveau riche or by BlackBerry-toting professionals. Whether he is right or wrong, the battle over exurbia awaits its day.

Bruegmann’s fantasy of superaffluence is only one example of the flawed sociological imagination at work in his book. His most consistent rationalization of urban change is a cyclical one — surely the most unhistorical of all explanatory models. According to this view, cities grow, mature, decline, and then are revived. Settlement patterns are simply natural reflections of the workings of each cycle. Notwithstanding that this cyclical motion would appear to override the influence of popular choice and mobility (Bruegmann’s preferred engine of change), it also renders negligible the uneven impact of decisions made by the most powerful actors and institutions in cities. For example, Bruegmann observes that urban decanting became a mass movement in the 1920s and that industry naturally accompanied, or even preceded, the population shift, so that by 1950 half of all manufacturing jobs were outside cities. Corporations, he opines, “moved with the expectation that the residential population would follow.”

But why did the factory owners move? An innocent reader would have no inkling that the American industrial city saw the most intense class warfare in the world during its heyday, and that the concentrated power of urban workers to halt production was the primary reason why industrialists opted to move their plants. There was nothing natural or cyclical about the reasons for, or the consequences of, that decision. A similar point could be made about the period when Bruegmann’s density gradients begin to flatten. The 1970s saw the onset of a further wave of corporate flight — from the Midwest and Northeast to the southern U.S. and, eventually, from there to the global South. You can see the impact of that ongoing flight in the fabric of most American cities and suburbs. This move offshore originated in an explicit desire to escape unionized workforces, and it has fundamentally altered the character of urban landscapes, but it doesn’t show up in Sprawl at all.

Bruegmann is quick to charge that the moral tirades of anti-sprawl advocates are usually based on their own aesthetic value judgments. On this point he is often on solid ground, even if his observations are mostly versions of those offered by Herbert Gans in the years following the publication of The Levittowners. But Bruegmann does his own share of aestheticizing. He prefers, for example, to view cities from the aerial perspective of jet aircraft, the higher the better. This impulse peaks in his attraction toward geographer Stuart Pierce’s stratospheric standpoint theory of the “galactic metropolis.” From a sufficiently great height, the settlements below appear like “stars, planets, and other celestial bodies, each exerting a force field,” and subject to the “entire gravitational system of a galaxy.” Social rationality is the first casualty in the sublime experience of this Milky Way.

In stark contrast is Dolores Hayden’s use of Jim Wark’s aerial photography in A Field Guide to Sprawl. Here the view is from a low-flying Cessna, and it allows us to zoom in on habitat forms obscured by the often abstruse nomenclature of the real-estate industry. Anti-sprawl lexicographers have taken to renaming those they consider most offensive, and Hayden and Wark offer readers a visual match for choice items in this devil’s dictionary: snout house, starter castle, boomburg, lulu, tank farm, alligator, edge node. But the landscape is not demonized. This is hardly an exercise in the vein of Peter Blake’s 1964 best-seller God’s Own Junkyard, which used visual evidence to condemn the tawdriness and environmental ruination of postwar strip development. Hayden is not aiming at aesthetic shock; indeed, the aerial shots are unavoidably fascinating. Rather, the goal is pedagogical: We have to learn how to identify and recognize what lies behind the professional’s jargon in order to lay the grounds for action. Environmentalists have long used aerial photographs as a political tool of landscape analysis, and the chief utility of these visuals for the activist is that they can readily be understood by nonspecialists in a way that zoning maps cannot. Seizing this potential, Hayden has designed her book as a lucid primer for the anti-sprawl apprentice.

For Bruegmann, frank agitprop like this is not only distasteful, it is also evidence of the ill-advised tactics of those he imagines are coalition leaders of an anti-sprawl movement. In this somewhat conspiratorial vein, he portrays these advocates in terms similar to the New Right’s image of the “liberal elite.” No one who inhabits what he calls the “clubby culture of downtown elite cultural groups” could possibly understand the needs and desires of “real” Americans. The latter dislike the “dirt and disorder” of the vibrant center city, and they are skeptical of the multicultural diversity that anti-sprawl elites tend to praise. Bruegmann adopts a similar “red state” posture toward environmentalist claims. Sustainable is castigated as a “warm and fuzzy” term, species loss “is still not well understood,” and there are no proven links between sprawl and global warming. The Bush administration would have no problem with these assessments.

In his classic essay on the strip (“Other-Directed Houses”), J.B. Jackson reminded us that urban form is best understood from the user’s standpoint. The strip, after all, is designed to be viewed from a moving vehicle. It makes no sense from a stationary standpoint and least of all from an altitude. Should the spirit of Jackson’s caveat be applied to the debate about sprawl? It might help clear the air. Although Bruegmann and Hayden are poles apart, neither believes we can learn much from the users of the sprawl habitat. Bruegmann’s vigorous libertarian defense of individual choice tells us no more about the lives and attitudes of sprawl residents than does Hayden’s longing to turn them into citizen-activists. One upholds their rights, the other emphasizes their responsibilities. But neither really wants to deal with the messy business of how sprawlers interact, physically and mentally, with the built environment that has generated so much controversy.

If we really want to learn from sprawl, we can no more assume that people are where they want to be than assume that we know what’s best for them. We need to meet them where they are and listen hard to their desires, complaints, and fears before moving to the next level. Sprawl may be more wrong than right, but that’s not really the point. If you start with the users, you’ll likely end up somewhere useful.

ANDREW ROSS, Professor of American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director, Metropolitan Studies Program, New York University; author, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons from Shanghai and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town.

Alex Krieger

Harvard Design Review

2006

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Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History is a very good and timely book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in cities or general patterns of human settlement. The book is meticulously researched, ambitious in historic scope, well reasoned, and enjoyable to read. It offers a carefully balanced, non-polemical overview of a subject much polemicized in recent times. I even enjoy the wit contained in the title. Unfortunately, and for some of the same reasons, I predict that few will extol the book’s virtues, because few today feel neutral about sprawl, or seek a balanced argument on behalf of sprawled America. Sprawl’s legion of condemners will express outrage, and find Bruegmann irresponsible. How can anyone, they will ask, in this day and age, especially an eminent historian of urbanization, defend the destructive impacts of sprawl? Whereas the defenders of sprawl, in the minority today but quite outspoken on the subject of protecting property rights, even in landowners’ decision to sprawl, will regret that the book is not more of a manifesto in favor of sprawl, though some may claim it as such.

Bruegmann stops short of championing sprawl in all of its manifestations, though he enumerates various appeals of low-density urbanization. Still, while he touts many social and economic benefits that he sees resulting from the modern era of decentralized metropolitan growth, he acknowledges that decentralization also yields less positive consequences on society. His principal shots across the bow of the anti-sprawl movement are three-fold: First, he rejects today’s pervasive idea that sprawl has and continues to be forced upon Americans by some complicit combination of careless public policy, corporate marketing (namely related to the auto and affiliated industries), and greedy land developers and home builders. He argues that the majority of Americans, and others across the world to whom similar choices are available, actually like the less dense environments that they inhabit. People surely prefer the sprawl of their own making, though Bruegmann admits that those enjoying their sprawl increasingly object to the additional sprawl being produced by newcomer neighbors.

Secondly, and as a partial rebuttal to the idea that sprawl is forced upon us, Bruegmann points to preferences for sprawl across cultures and across history. Here Bruegmann’s command of urban history yields numerous statistics and examples of horizontal urban spread from ancient Rome to the capitals of contemporary Europe, the latter often used by sprawl-busters as the antithesis of homogenous, sprawling American metro areas. He makes a compelling case that in many cultures it is growing affluence, with its resulting expansion of available dwelling choices, which historically leads to peripheral urban expansion. It is hard to deny that the traditional members of the three “P’s,” the powerful, the privileged, and the pious (as in popes and cardinals), consistently succumbed to the temptation of building villas and estates out in the countryside, so as to enjoy escape from the rasping frictions of urban centers. So why is it so odd to assume, he asks, that similar choices would not be taken in the modern era, once resources and technologies made it possible, by members first of the merchant and business classes, and finally you and me. Some anthropologists even theorize that humanity is biologically wired to thrive, or be attracted to, smaller social groupings and natural settings, rather than enormous congregations of population. So Bruegmann intimates, as others have done, that the highly compact, dense, 19th-century industrial city—the city that aroused Charles Dickens’s ire, not admiration—may have been an aberrant form of human settlement, rather than a model for contemporary urbanization as some sentimentally assert.

Thirdly, Bruegmann sets out to challenge some of today’s near-hysterical claims about the destructive impacts of sprawl. He would like to detoxify the term, and in part does so by accounting for its various definitional associations, meanings that shift across time and across people’s different perspectives on suburbanization. He reminds us that for much of American history, really from Jefferson’s time on, decentralization was considered progressive, a social good, and a measure of citizens’ economic advancement, the opposite of a major social problem. And he points out that such associations still exist, and continue to support the sprawling instinct.

The book is organized into three parts. The first six chapters establish his position by outlining the difficulties of defining sprawl exactly, by reviewing its many causes while challenging some of the accusations made by opponents, and by offering examples across urban history of its persistence. Thus, he methodically removes sprawl from the common supposition that it is unique to our time. The next four chapters are dedicated to different (and for him somewhat doomed) anti-sprawl campaigns. These include the arguments against urban spread made in Britain during the 1920s, understandable as London was already one of the world’s largest and most spread out cities; reactions in America, largely from academics, planners and others whom he terms “elites,” against the rapid suburbanization in the post-World War II period; and finally the current campaign, accelerating in intensity since the late 1970s and maturing today under slogans such as new urbanism and smart growth, the campaign that surely motivated him to write this book. But all these he sees as merely recurring arguments from an even earlier time, as he states in the short chapter introducing the three campaigns: “virtually every argument leveled against sprawl today can be found in [the] description of London and other European industrial cities in the 19th-century.” Later on he refers further back in history still, for example, to Queen Elizabeth’s effort in the 16th century to prohibit building at the edges of London, a prohibition that, of course, had little long-term effect.

The final three chapters are devoted to discussing, and generally pointing out the very limited success, of what he terms remedies to curb sprawl. On these pages he rightly notes the inevitability, and cites many examples, of gainers and losers that result from any substantial efforts to control land use and urbanization. He acknowledges that centralized government authority can control urban expansion, for example citing the success of Soviet Moscow’s efforts to control peripheral growth, but questions whether such success outweighs the disadvantages caused by limiting citizens’ choices. He offers a lengthy and thoughtful assessment of America’s most famous metropolitan effort at controlling sprawl, the case of Portland, Oregon. While acknowledging the courage of the effort, he generally sides with more recent skeptics who wonder whether it has been the growth boundary measures or the generally slow regional population growth of Portland, say by comparison to Houston or Phoenix over the same time period, that has helped retain many of the urbane characteristics that advocates of Portland’s livability cite. He notes that the overall density of the Portland metro area is significantly lower than that of Los Angeles, the longstanding poster child of uncontrolled sprawl. He worries, as others recently have, about various inequities that may have been inadvertent consequences of land use policies, such as rapid increase in land values, or unforeseen diminishment in transit usage by the switch to higher profile light rail systems at the expense of the number of bus lines, thus actually reducing the overall percentage of the population with convenient access to transit. I am sure that he is not surprised at the victory of last year’s referendum (following the publication of Sprawl) that seeks monetary compensation for landowners outside the growth boundary claiming loss of value to their land resulting from the growth boundary. This is generally seen as a serious backlash to Portland’s generations-long experiment in regional land-use controls.

While I generally admire Bruegmann’s nuanced review of the causes and appeals of sprawl, and his determination to rebalance the social and economic arguments for and against sprawl, and while I concur with his supposition that there is a certain inevitability to horizontal spread of urban populations, I do fault him for remaining all too silent on sprawl’s consumptive nature. Low-density settlement may be appealing to many who enjoy the lifestyle or profit from it, whether real estate moguls or individual homeowners, but it is hardly an efficient use of land or the world’s resources. And the cumulative burdens upon the environment of pervasive urban sprawl cannot be wished away by the popular appeal of sprawl. There is that not insignificant problem of multiplication that Bruegmann ignores. If three hundred million Americans choose to sprawl, much less a billion affluent-and-freedom-gaining Chinese (!), that is quite a different matter than several thousand Englishmen planting themselves on the outskirts of 16th-century London. Worldwide environmental degradation has many causes, but sprawl is certainly a contributor. A billion “sprawlers” IS a cause for worry. Few can argue that low-density development does not increase auto emissions, water use, pollution, trash, loss of species habitat, and energy consumption. To cite one example, most pollution of groundwater, lakes, streams, and rivers in the United States is caused by runoff that collects various toxins on the high percentage of impervious surfaces, like roads and parking lots, in urbanized regions. The heating and cooling of freestanding homes, with their many exterior walls per capita, requires more energy than attached, denser development. And then there are those immaculate lawns that require ample water and chemicals to maintain. Of course, most such conditions are caused by increasing affluence, not just settlement patterns, though affluence and sprawl are quite related as Bruegmann consistently points out. Bruegmann remains just a little too sanguine about the environmental consequences of sprawl. There is little doubt that calls for better environmental stewardship—leading to legislated restrictions on development—will increase in the coming decades, influencing urbanization patterns considerably at least in the developed world.

Bruegmann’s courageous narrative would have even more force had he concluded, even as he articulated the historic benefits of sprawl, that what some call or hope will become “The Green Millennium” needs to unfold freer of sprawl than the prior one.

ALEX KRIEGER, Professor in Practice of Urban Design, GSD; Principal, CHan Krieger & Associates, Architecture and Urban Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 2007, Vol. 73, No. 2

2007

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‍This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America

Anthony Flint. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006. 310 pages. $24.95.

Sprawl: A Compact History

Robert Bruegmann. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006. 306 pages. $27.50, $17 (paperback).

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Roundtable Overview:

Robert E. Lang and Jennifer R. LeFurgy

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Ten years ago, JAPA published a point-counterpoint debate on sprawl between Reid Ewing and co-authors Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson. The exchange sparked controversy and was widely regarded as summarizing the opposing positions on sprawl up to that time. The debate focused mostly on the costs of sprawl, with Ewing making the case for a compact city form while Gordon and Richardson argued for a more dispersed, market-led development pattern.

This Review Roundtable revisits the sprawl debate by exploring two new books on the subject. The books are Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History and Anthony Flint’s This Land. Although the books do not address each other’s arguments directly, we felt they would serve as proxies for the two sides. Bruegmann’s book takes a historical-libertarian view on the topic and argues that sprawl is not a problem, while Flint’s work is more critical and cautionary.

Several key researchers whose ideas helped inform the 1997 debate have continued to publish on the topic. For example, Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution wrote in 1999 about the link between sprawl and urban decline (“Some realities about sprawl and urban decline,” Housing Policy Debate 10(4), 955-974). In addition, in 2000 Robert Burchell of Rutgers University and coauthors updated and refined earlier efforts to determine the costs of sprawl. (Costs of sprawl—2000. Washington, DC: Transit Cooperative Research Program. TCRP Report 74).

Researchers also sought to define and measure sprawl in the United States. Interestingly, one of the better known efforts is an analysis in USA Today in 2001 by Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg.

(“A comprehensive look at sprawl in America,” pp. Al, 12-13, February 22). The newspaper employed methods first suggested by Anthony Downs to gauge shifts in population density at the metropolitan level. Academic work focused on metropolitan density patterns followed, while other researchers developed a more multidimensional method to track urban sprawl.

A consistent finding in these studies is that sprawl varies widely among U.S. metropolitan areas. Yet a distinct regional pattern also emerges. The West, especially the Southwest, maintains surprisingly dense metropolitan form. The fact that Los Angeles, the poster child of sprawl in Ewing’s 1997 critique, has the densest census-defined urbanized area in the United States demonstrates to Bruegmann how smart growth advocates such as Ewing have misread sprawl. The same is true for other notable Sunbelt cities famous for their sprawl such as Phoenix and Las Vegas. As Bruegmann notes:

Cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas are often described as the ultimate in sprawl. In fact, they tend to be rather compact settlements with little abandoned housing or vacant land at the center and almost none of the exurban penumbra that surrounds almost all of the older cities of the American northeast (p. 66).

Our panel noted that both subject books were generally readable; however, they clearly favored Flint’s work over Bruegmann’s. This comes as no surprise given that most participants are urban planning faculty and that the planning field in general comes down against sprawl. Yet most panelists did give Bruegmann credit for his scholarship, as Robert Fishman notes:

Bruegmann is really the first libertarian whom one can take seriously on the city. He really knows urban history; he knows the way cities work. And he is trying to understand sprawl from that perspective. I think he is asking: What does policy mean? How can we really implement it?

Flint, while striking some as too journalistic, was praised for the sophistication with which he depicted the current debate over sprawl. Flint’s on-the-ground reporting of how people perceive sprawl was noted by several roundtable panelists. In fact, one critic of Flint’s journalistic style, John Landis, still thought Flint’s book provided a useful window into the American mind on sprawl. Landis finds:

When I contrast those voices [of people Flint interviewed] to those of my university colleagues and students, I do start to worry that maybe… we in academia… are a little out of touch. It was this ability to cause me to question my own beliefs that led me to enjoy reading both books, but especially Flint’s.

Despite generally favorable reviews for both works, the panel did note some major gaps. For example, some panelists observed that neither book offered much advice on how to accommodate future growth. Again, this is an insight one would expect from the panel, given the future focus among most planners. Panelists also found that neither book really advanced the Ewing versus Gordon/Richardson debate from ten years ago, although they credited Flint with making an attempt. Finally, though they found both books interesting and useful for other purposes, none seemed willing to assign either of these books as a main graduate text.

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Roundtable Discussion

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Moderator:

Robert E. Lang, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Participants:

Robert Fishman, University of Michigan

Ann Forsyth, University of Minnesota

John Landis, University of California, Berkeley

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, University of California, Los Angeles

Arthur C. Nelson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Rolf Pendall, Cornell University

Harry Richardson, University of Southern California

Anne Vernez Moudon, University of Washington

The following is an edited version of the panel’s discussion.

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LANG: Let me state my bias up front—I like both books. And they both were, to me, readable. One [Bruegmann] is obviously more academically oriented than the other [Flint], yet both books had merits. How do you see the plusses and minuses of these two books?

NELSON: What I was surprised about with both books is that they lack a perspective on where we were in 1950 and where we are today. They both did a wonderful job of reflecting on events, nuances, issues, and personalities. But we have to start with where we were in 1950. In 1930, we had 150 million people, about 40 million homes, 50 million jobs, and about 20 billion square feet of nonresidential space. That’s where we were. In 2006, we’re at 300 million people, twice as many people, and 120 million homes, three times as many as in 1950. We’re at 160 million jobs, including part-time jobs. We have 90 billion square feet of nonresidential space, four and a half times the amount of nonresidential space as 1950. Between 1950 and 2006, how could cities meet this explosive growth by themselves? I think that is the context missing from both books. Bruegmann summarizes, “It’s amazing we actually did this.” That was one of his last paragraphs. “It is amazing we actually pulled this off.” Both authors say, “What do we do next?” “Where do we take it from here?” I think they both give us a platform to consider the future in historical context, but they both lack perspective on what is really ahead of us, in my view.

LOUKAITOU-SIDERIS: I definitely agree with you. And I actually put in my notes that while I did very much appreciate the historical comparative context, particularly in the Bruegmann book, he does not really relate the degree or scale of the effect of sprawl.

FISHMAN: Bruegmann does not make 1945 a large divide because he wants to show that sprawl is always with us. He wants to point out that it is a kind of inevitable force that will always be there. To say that we had to expand, that there was no room to accommodate growth without expansion to the suburbs, is to miss the crucial elements of the disinvestment and abandonment of the core cities.

NELSON: You’re right about places like Detroit and Cleveland and some other cities. But other cities have recently seen a rebound. I think it was more difficult at the time to rebuild and redevelop in central cities than it was to invest in the greenfields. And developers had to meet market demands quickly. Let’s face it, people wanted new suburban homes, and builders delivered. But that was all part of meeting growing and changing needs, including the needs of a mass market. I think now is the time to reflect and say, “Okay, what about the next 50 years? Where should we head there?” I’m not sure I got the lessons from these two books on where we should go. They asked the questions, but they didn’t really provide suggestions.

LANDIS: Does either book move us forward from the discussion ten years ago? In my view, Bruegmann’s book does not. Its view of sprawl as declining density is just too simplistic for this day and age. Others have departed from this mono-dimensional view of sprawl with some subtlety. What I saw in Bruegmann’s book was essentially what Colin Clark wrote about 50 years ago: the declining density gradient. The lack of a deeper history in Bruegmann’s book was also surprising, given that he is an historian.

Flint’s book, on the other hand, is a significant contribution. What I liked most about it was how he demonstrated how people and events really matter. This was reflected in the discussion of Measure 37 in Oregon as a backlash against excessive regulation and smart growth. I think this idea, that people and events at the local level help shape national debates, is very important, and we often forget it.

FORSYTH: I think Bruegmann is attacking the elite and architectural critiques of sprawl. He is not particularly concerned with environmental or social issues. His book doesn’t have a central question. Rather, it offers a proposal: that sprawl isn’t so bad, that it has been around a long time, and he suggests that the people who are criticizing it are snobs. I think that is a really valid critique. Flint’s book is different. It asks the questions: “How does this smart-growth thing play out? Does it have the tools to really make a difference in urban development? And if you use smart growth, will it be a better place? Will it solve our problems?”

PENDALL: I thought it was interesting that Flint went to the Advancing Regional Equity Summit in Philadelphia two years ago. He told the fair growth story that is out there and really needs to be told. He is concerned about urban reform, and that is definitely new and could be explored more, especially the idea of access to opportunity. In the past, civil rights advocates have focused on civil rights laws and enforcement, and people who are interested in social equity have worked on racial and income integration, but most of these advocates weren’t really thinking about land use very much. Now there are a lot of scholars trying to fuse those two ideas—civil rights and smart growth—into a fair growth movement. By highlighting fair growth, Flint picks up on something new and asks us to think about how the stakes of fighting sprawl might differ according to race and class.

Bruegmann, by contrast, treats race entirely dismissively. He says, essentially, race doesn’t matter, claiming that whites are suburbanizing, and so are blacks. He doesn’t talk about the conditions of black suburbanization in the 1960s and early 1970s; these suburbs were, frankly, of poor quality compared with white suburbs. Even now, whites and blacks operate in housing submarkets that are distinct from one another. This does not seem to make any difference to Bruegmann, because he’s viewing the world from such a high remove that he wants sprawl to be the same thing across the United States and, perhaps, throughout history. It is not the same thing throughout the United States. Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester are sprawling, in part, because they are hyper-segregated. And they are hyper-segregated, in part, because they are sprawling. So to dismiss race from the picture, I think, is one of the clear distinctions between the books. What Flint is noticing, I think, is really very interesting and pleasing. It is a source of new dialogue that will continue.

LOUKAITOU-SIDERIS: Bruegmann says that sprawl is really a free market response that exists because of affluence and that government policies have had no impact. And in doing so, he, in my view, makes some ridiculous arguments, such as that “Federal spending today goes more heavily per capita to central cities than to suburbs.” On the other hand, I appreciate Flint’s points because, essentially, all this is very political. He presents his different groups and the struggle between the two different positions. And I think that is the difference.

FISHMAN: Bruegmann is really the first libertarian whom one can take seriously on the city. He really knows urban history; he knows the way cities work. And he is trying to understand sprawl from that perspective. I think he is asking: What does policy mean? How can we really implement it?

RICHARDSON: I thought both books made good reading. My main problem with Bruegmann was claiming that it is history. He should have presented the evolution of the debate or a pessimistic or optimistic view of the debate. He should have made clear that what he was really doing was making a rhetorical argument and using scraps of historical evidence to back up his research. Bruegmann is more concerned about how he says something than what he says. The problem that I have with Flint’s is that it’s just too journalistic for my taste.

VERNEZ MOUDON: I have to say that while I enjoyed both books, I would not recommend them as texts in my classes because they seem too incomplete in their treatment of sprawl, and too single-sided. I would, however, recommend them to individual students seeking to understand sprawl, because both books are well crafted within their respective niche. I have a sense that Bruegmann chose sprawl as the subject of his book in order to position himself in urban design and planning. Unfortunately, by trying to argue that sprawl is everywhere, in the history of cities and in the world, he belittles the phenomenon and, at least indirectly, the importance of his own book! I wish he would have explored more seriously the fact that there have been and are many different kinds of sprawl. It seems fair to say that Bruegmann only dwells cogently with British-style sprawl, characterized by comparatively low-density suburban housing and retail. This is much too limited an approach to the history of ubiquitous sprawl. Yesterday I saw a presentation on the growth of Shanghai, which, in terms of the numbers and trends that Chris Nelson first reported on in this discussion, makes the U.S. urban growth and sprawl problem look like child’s play. Shanghai tripled in population over the past 50 years, and has had an average annual growth of 25.7 percent in urban construction over the past decade. Yet our colleagues’ presentation yesterday indicated that Shanghai’s footprint today remains within ten kilometers of its primary center. Ten kilometers, that is 6 miles. How is this the same sprawl as the sprawl we are currently experiencing in the 150-mile Dallas-Ft. Worth region? In this sense, both books, but Bruegmann’s especially, because it claims to be a history of sprawl, remain too remote from the reality of “world sprawl.”

PENDALL: I think we have learned an awful lot in the past ten years that is not reflected in these books. Bruegmann’s book mentions the ideology of sprawl, the cause of sprawl, and the effects of sprawl in its various dimensions. I think a lot of planners are moving beyond just calling it sprawl and thinking about density, continuity, and mixed use, in particular. We are doing much more measuring. And yet whom are we letting write the books? We are letting the journalists and the architectural historians write the books! I need to point the finger back at myself, probably as much as anyone. So to what extent should we look for collaborations, stronger connections, and even co-authorships that will result in the translation of what we do know? That’s one question. And the second is, even if we did, would they buy it? Flint’s story, which is about where we are, is almost half the story. It is an interesting story, it is good, and it is fun, but if you read it for a couple of minutes, and then you go away and you come back for a couple more, then you forget it. I would want something much different than that approach for my students. I would want something that has great pictures and that explains everything in vernacular.

LOUKAITOU-SIDERIS: I would definitely agree. And at least for myself, what I found most useful in the last ten years is empirical studies that try to give some specific answers as how to measure sprawl.

FORSYTH: I think it is great to analyze sprawl. But part of what is happening in the sprawl debate is about how to build better suburbs and how to do that in ways that are appropriate. Is the main issue social equity? Is it global warming? Is it habitat loss? Is it all of those things packaged together? And in that case, I thought Bruegmann really did not care about how to build better suburbs in America. Flint is trying a little bit more. He is looking at smart growth groups and the suburbanites. He is not dwelling on the more detailed analysis, but includes a good discussion about values underlying the critiques of sprawl. For example, what are the problems and how do we do it better?

NELSON: What I liked about Flint’s book is that he unmasked Randal O’Toole. Bruegmann takes O’Toole’s work as on par with our scholarly peer review. But O’Toole’s work has never been through the review process, as our work has. Yet, Bruegmann is holding up O’Toole’s work on par with our work. Flint, a journalist, unmasked O’Toole. He says there’s no foundation for his assertions. But Flint goes one step further. Flint actually says, “O’Toole is a NIMBY.” O’Toole, who lives in Oak Grove, Oregon, was displeased that the Clackamas County Commissioners were going to impose higher density rezoning in his neighborhood. O’Toole said, “No, I like my neighborhood just the way it is, thank you.” He became a NIMBY. So O’Toole was stimulated into this whole sprawl/anti-sprawl debate because he is a NIMBY. But he doesn’t himself have any solutions for meeting the kinds of needs that are emerging.

FISHMAN: Flint actually goes one step further and talks about O’Toole as part of very well-financed special interest groups.

NELSON: You’re right. Flint mentions the funding sources for O’Toole. Flint does something that Bruegmann doesn’t do and says, “We’re already socially engineered.” The policies from the Great Depression forward, from both parties, are socially engineered to a certain outcome. O’Toole does not recognize that we’ve been socially engineered already through sprawl-inducing federal policies.

LANDIS: One of the things I particularly liked about Flint’s book, although I agree that it is quite journalistic, is that it gives us some ideas about alternative futures. As people’s incomes rise, I believe most do want a greater degree of privacy and control over their environments, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they want sprawl as we produce it in America; there are other models. Flint gets to these other models, but rarely in the depth they deserve.

RICHARDSON: Yes, I agree, in the last 10 or 15 years or more, studies have shown that a very, very high percentage of households want a single-family home and a private yard. However, not everyone does. The strongest housing markets in the Seattle area have been condo markets, both in downtown Seattle, and in Bellevue. The price per square foot was much higher than the single-family homes in the best suburbs. I know that Flint hinted at that. He said that, you know, people are beginning to change and I think that maybe they are beginning to change. I think that preferences may be becoming more heterogeneous. Provided we follow Flint’s prescriptions, we can create the conditions under which markets can respond to those heterogeneous preferences and then perhaps we would make progress.

PENDALL: We have different urban trends already happening in the United States. I did not see that Bruegmann discussed them. For example, Phoenix and Las Vegas are becoming denser. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix will become the regions of the future. They will become denser, but they will not expand hugely. They will fill in their cores. Their suburbs will become more urban. The rapid growth of the Latino population is an influence, in particular. We see the gateway cities growing in density, rapidly. However, Houston is low density, but it is holding up pretty well. There is no zoning, and that is almost preferable to places like Atlanta that have a lot of exclusionary zoning.

FISHMAN: I think we should give Bruegmann credit for recognizing the variation in different metropolitan areas. If you look at what we’ve learned in the ten years since Ewing and Gordon and Richardson were published, I think, first of all, we have learned from the academics about the different kinds of sprawl. But we’ve also learned from the real world that there are different preferences.

These were the ten years in which the preference for high-density urban living has become a real trend along with suburbanization. And I think the issue that Bruegmann is raising is: Have we, as planners and policymakers, really understood our research, understood the meaning of this variability? Bruegmann’s idea is that planners are always caught in a time lag and too simplistic in their recommendations. I think that the real challenge is to try to craft a response to sprawl in all its varieties that really does give policymakers the freedom to respond to these realities.

FORSYTH: Bruegmann explains that Los Angeles is a lot denser than a lot of other places and I appreciated that he said it is maybe not so bad. Bruegmann is concerned, more than Flint, about the differing patterns of urban development, the shape of those density patterns, and the character of the urban form.

LANDIS: I think it is quite interesting that while Bruegmann casts himself in the libertarian role, it is Flint who comes up with the more amazing conclusion, which is to completely get rid of zoning. He says that there is nothing good in zoning that we should just get rid of it, and leave it to the market to come up with more diverse and creative solutions. Flint is hardly the first person to say this, but he makes the key point that it is our institutions that are getting in the way of the public interest.

NELSON: I started by saying neither author gave us perspectives on how we have to meet certain needs. I will now say neither author looks to the future to sort of say what is going to happen, and at least ask the question: “How are we going to deal with this?” In 2006, we will add half a million people over 65. In 2025 that number will grow to nearly 2 million people for that year alone. I don’t believe for a minute that we are preparing ourselves for the needs of a growing senior population. On top of that, 35% of the households will be single-person households. The single person probably has very different preferences. We really don’t know where we need to start envisioning this kind of future. Flint, with his journalistic orientation, had a chance to say: “Okay, here is where we’re headed and here is where we are and let’s abandon zoning and let’s replace it with something else.”

PENDALL: One of Bruegmann’s subsections … is called “Converging Cities.” He looks at Europe. He looks at the United States. His story is about convergence. There is a slight inconsistency, though, when he talks about exurbia. Because he says that exurbia is the real problem, or maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But he is using data that completely overlook exurbia, because that is entirely outside of Census-defined urbanized areas. So if exurbia is a problem, and if exurbia varies across metropolitan areas, which it does, then he is absolutely wrong about convergence. He may be noticing the current differences, but his view of the future is a view of convergence, not one of a divergence among these urban forms. And I think divergence is every bit as likely as, if not more likely than, the convergence scenario he paints.

FISHMAN: Your argument is one that would improve his book strongly. His whole philosophy is a really greater flexibility for planning.

PENDALL: One of Bruegmann’s arguments is there is very little that we can do. Human agency does not matter. That, to me, is the most dangerous subtext in these books, for us. We can’t just throw up our hands.

LANDIS: Both of these authors come to essentially the same conclusion, which is to let builders build and let the market work. I want to ask this group whether they think this is a good prescription.

LOUKAITOU-SIDERIS: I think that we do need to look into what the market wants, but I certainly believe that planners should not only rely on market factors. I felt that the Bruegmann book opposes planning and unfairly blames planners.

FORSYTH: I’ve actually never been a great fan of zoning. But zoning isn’t the whole toolbox of planning. I believe in visioning about the future and being able to think through the possible effects of urban development and problems that could occur.

NELSON: Let’s not confuse zoning with planning. I think we need to go back to planning and rethink the role of zoning and rethink other organizational tools. If we’re going to add another one million people to the metropolitan area in Washington D.C. in the next ten years, where are we going to put the water and sewage investments to accommodate them? We have to have some idea where that demand is going to be and its configuration. So we have to plan ahead to invest in the infrastructure to accommodate growth. If we don’t, worse things could happen. The question is: How do we plan, and what do we plan for? I don’t think zoning is the solution; zoning is the problem. I don’t think either of the authors came to that conclusion.

VERNEZ MOUDON: Those are important comments. Yet, knowing that everyone around this table is no fool, I have to ask: do we really think that there is the “market” on one side and urban “planning” on the other? We know the market is planned (interest rates, taxes, etc., are not established naturally). And we know that urban planning responds, more or less, to market trends, with or without zoning. By concluding that we should let the market work, I think neither of the authors wants to take a clear position on the future. Their position is not controversial, and perhaps they don’t want to be controversial.

LANG: I think Bruegmann might want to be controversial.

VERNEZ MOUDON: He wasn’t very effective then!

LANDIS: I agree, it is not controversial to us; but to the average reader, maybe.

VERNEZ MOUDON: Back to making recommendations about these books, I would recommend Bruegmann’s book not as a textbook, but as a reference to the study of advances in urban history. As with Flint’s book, I think it might be the book to recommend to those of our neighbors interested in finding out about the world of urban planning and about what planners do. I suspect Flint’s book should be effective for a lay audience and should be recommended as such.

PENDALL: [Regarding] the last question that you posed, “Where is the debate over sprawl going next?” I think there are multiple directions, because we now have these multiple indicators. We are going to be thinking about multiple indicators and their multiple impacts. I think one interesting direction is in thinking about access to opportunity. How do these patterns privilege or remove privilege from people, systemically, on the basis of race, class, or national origin? And instead of calling it sprawl, can we say development patterns? It is also an interesting direction because people are looking at it from a variety of professions now. We have sociologists, political scientists, planners and geographers looking at sprawl through different lenses. All of them are currently interested in mapping out and understanding both the variety and the consequences of different arrangements of opportunities and space. Do our low-income kids have access to good schools? Do our laborers have access to affordable housing near the jobs that they are going to be working at? Do the education systems work well together? All these are underdefined in planning.

FORSYTH: I think that Flint and Bruegmann are obviously onto something when they talk about market preferences and that people are making decisions in relation to their individual lives. I think that in the future people may well focus on biological issues that are both individual and collective, such as health impacts and ecological damage.

LOUKAITOU-SIDERIS: I would like to go back to this issue of the need to plan. I live in a city that is expected to grow significantly in the next decade. We have to accommodate growth. And I don’t see, with notable exceptions, how planners are going to accommodate growth. We really need to make some critical decisions on this. We have to contribute as educators as well. It is also the tremendous responsibility of municipal departments. There may be some exceptions of cities and states trying to develop roadmaps of how and where to accommodate new growth, but these are few and far between.

VERNEZ MOUDON: It is interesting that initiatives to limit zoning powers and to retroactively compensate property owners for development rights impeded by zoning have been on the ballots recently. Flint discusses Oregon’s Measure 37, which passed. But a similar proposition, 933, did not pass in Washington. This indicates that voters understand the powers and the need for land regulations.

LANG: Similar measures did not pass in Idaho or California either. But one did pass in Arizona.

FISHMAN: One of two things coming out of these books is that we have been over-regulating things that we probably shouldn’t be regulating at all. Secondly, we are not doing enough on the fundamental issues of infrastructure, especially, which are at the heart of planning. Those are two, to me, very important parts of the discussion. I also want to close on a theme we didn’t really raise, which is urban design. I don’t know if other people around the table felt this, and Flint’s book doesn’t talk much about this at all. We really haven’t gotten very far beyond Seaside and Kentlands on alternatives to conventional suburban design.

RICHARDSON: The market created sprawl and the market could eliminate sprawl. There are price-driven trends towards smaller lots. The concerns about low density will die away.

LANDIS: I’ll come back to the two books for my conclusion. Whenever I read books like this, I always compare them to what I think is the gold standard for this type of work, A Better Place to Live by Phillip Langdon, published in 1994. Neither Bruegmann nor Flint is as good as that, but after listening to all of you, I would consider using both of these in an undergraduate land use policy or planning course. At the graduate level, I could see Flint’s book replacing my second choice which is, David Brooks’ Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. I hardly ever agree with David Brooks, but what I liked about Bobos in Paradise was that it included the voices of middle class suburbanites. Flint’s book includes an even broader variety of voices and perspectives of real people with real concerns. When I contrast those voices to those of my university colleagues and students, I do start to worry that maybe… we in academia… are a little out of touch. It was this ability to cause me to question my own beliefs that led me to enjoy reading both books, but especially Flint’s.

LANG: Okay. We have reached the end of the session. Thank you all for participating.

Reviewed by Joel Kotkin

Wall Street Journal

December 10, 2005

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In Praise of ’Burbs

Academics, planners and tastemakers may vilify suburbia as an American blight. But even the Romans knew: It can be nice to get out of the city

Sprawl: A Compact History

By Robert Bruegmann

University of Chicago Press, 264 pages, $27.50

For at least half a century, academics, aesthetes and all-purpose agonizers have looked at our ever-sprawling cities with disdain and even horror. The spectacle of rings and rings of humankind nested in single-family homes has inspired in them all sorts of revulsion and, relatedly, a whole discipline of blame: Suburban sprawl has been faulted for exacerbating racial tension, contributing to energy shortages, worsening pollution and heating up the globe – even expanding waistlines.

Largely missing from this debate has been a sound and reasoned history of this pattern of living. With Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History, we now have one. What a pleasure it is: well-written, accessible and eager to challenge the current cant about sprawl.

No, Mr. Bruegmann says, don’t go blaming the Federal Highway Administration for sprawl or the executives at General Motors and Exxon or racist developers fleeing urban environments. Don’t even blame Karl Rove. You really don’t need to blame anyone. Mr. Bruegmann notes that contemporary sprawl – best defined by places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Houston – is nothing new. It represents “merely the latest chapter in a long and curious history.”

What propels that curious history is something often overlooked by the makers of grand theories – the particular choices of individual human beings. Mr. Bruegmann places the urge to sprawl squarely where it belongs: on people’s logical desire to escape the high costs, crime, pollution, congestion and lack of privacy that accompanies life in dense cities.

As is often the case, Rome, really the first great city, provides a telling early example. At its height in the classical period, Mr. Bruegmann notes, it possessed the population of modern-day Dallas but in one-fiftieth of the space. Even with an impressive water and sewer system, and sometimes enlightened administration, the place must have been unbearingly noisy, noisome crowded and expensive.

Not surprisingly, a lot of folks headed out to the suburbium. For the poor and working class, the move was often a matter of finding cheaper housing and a less regulated environment for running such distasteful businesses as slaughterhouses and such infernal ones as brick-making. For the elites, then as now, the cool hillsides or beachfront in the nearby hinterland represented the ideal place for the elegant pastoral estates so celebrated in Latin poetry.

Mr. Bruegmann finds this pattern of flight taking place virtually any place dense urban centers develop, whether in Ming China, Renaissance Italy or early modern Europe. But it was the Industrial Revolution that really pushed the growth of suburbia. Industrial-age cities of the 19th century were even more crowded, more dirty and more polluted than their premodern counterparts.

Clearly something had to be done. One solution, still widely appealing to many architects, academics and planners, was redesigning the metropolis to make density work. Napoleon III’s renovation of Paris stands as the classic example of this approach. Under Napoleon’s edicts, many of the city’s crowded, winding streets and neighborhoods – breeding grounds both for revolutionary sans-culottes and crime – were obliterated. In their place he created broad boulevards, elegant monuments and parks, making the city safe for the elites and the affluent. As for those whose neighborhoods were destroyed, they were shuttled out to the nearer suburbs, with long-term consequences we witnessed in this fall’s rioting.

But most cities did not follow Paris’s model, falling instead into that of London, the greatest metropolis of the time. In London, nascent democracy meant that no great controlling central authority could redesign the city by fiat. So anyone who could manage to get out, well, got out, usually to some country village that would soon become a residential bedroom of the capital. As an observer noted as early as 1843, London “surrounds itself, suburb clinging to suburb, like onions fifty to a rope.”

With the rise of commuter rails, telegraph, telephones and then automobiles in the 20th century, urban dispersion accelerated dramatically. “Sprawl,” loosely defined, became a global phenomenon. Cities in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South America – with cheap land and growing populations – took the idea of fleeing dense urban centers and, so to speak, ran with it.

Yet the reasons for the sprawl around Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Tokyo are not so unlike those of third-century Rome. The needs and preferences of individuals, families and businesses matter most. To attempt to understand sprawl from this perspective, of course, flies in the face of most academic “urban theory” as well as the collected wisdom of most planners, architects and the media.

It is believed, for example, that sprawl is a peculiarly “American” disease, another sign of our decadence and wastefulness. Yet in reality, U.S.-style sprawl can be found everywhere now, including metropolitan Paris, where the far-out suburbs of the Grand Couronne are harvesting much of the region’s job and population growth. Even crowded China has its suburban tracts, some with odd names like “Orange County.”

Wherever it appears, sprawl incites its enemies. In our own time, Mr. Bruegmann observes, much of the anti-sprawl venom comes not from the working class or middle class but from well-heeled urbanites with expensive apartments in Georgetown and Beacon Hill or on Central Park. Many such critics – just think of John Kerry or Al Gore – also own spacious country estates and naturally are not happy about exurban developers luring the masses too close to their weekend idylls.

Mr. Bruegmann rightly dismisses “the campaign to reform other people’s lives” launched by these anti-sprawl scolds – such as urban-growth boundaries and restrictions on the construction of single-family homes. Rather than try to strangle suburbia, he suggests, we ought to try to live with this new, expansive form of city.

As powerful as sprawl logic may be, the traditional city is far from dead. Mr. Bruegmann, a longtime Chicago resident and a professor at the University of Illinois campus there, is particularly bullish on amenity-rich older cities – New York, Boston, Seattle and Portland, as well as Chicago. They can lay claim to a promising demographic niche among the nomadic rich, the young and those who cater to their needs.

Yet Mr. Bruegmann understands that the future of urbanity will likely be shaped not in these adult Disneylands but in the peripheries to which families, jobs and industries are now fleeing. Such flight should not be a cause for despair among those who love cities. Suburban communities are not frozen in their current form; many are busily developing their own core districts, cultural facilities and particular identities.

Urbanists interested in the future need to pay more attention and give more respect to such places. Mr. Bruegmann has told us why they grow and will continue to do so. The next step is figuring out how to make them work better.

Kevin Nance

Chicago Sun Times

December 27, 2005

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Complaining about suburban sprawl is a national pastime. It’s bad for the planet, the prevailing theory goes – energy-consuming, highway-clogging, pollution-creating, farmland-gobbling – and soulless and ugly to boot. But in his controversial and gleefully contrarian new book Sprawl: A Compact History (University of Chicago Press, $27.50), Chicago author Robert Bruegmann questions the assumptions behind each of those assertions. A professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he doesn’t exactly defend sprawl, but he argues that it’s no worse than other urban settings.

“Dense central cities have some advantages, but they also have some tremendous disadvantages: congestion, pollution, crime, all the things that central cities have been criticized for in the past 100 years,” says Bruegmann, whose previous books include an award-winning history of the Chicago architecture firm Holabird & Roche. “The same is true of sprawl – it has all kinds of problems, but I don’t know that they’re any worse than any other part of the urban area.”

Among the suburban sprawl presumptions: Sprawl leads to excessive energy consumption caused by long commutes: “The problem isn’t private transportation,” Bruegmann insists. “The problem is that we have an old-fashioned 19th-century technology, the internal combustion engine using fossil fuels. Let’s solve that problem – maybe by creating small, fuel-efficient vehicles – and stop talking about putting the city back into its 19th-century state to make mass transit work. Instead, let’s see what people want to do, then see how the city can be built around them.”

Sprawl causes loss of farmland: “Despite all of the scare tactics that we’ve had for 200 years about population inevitably outstripping agricultural production, agriculture is on the rise throughout the globe, except in those places where people are killing each other in civil wars,” Bruegmann says. “In the U.S., we’re losing agricultural land every year, but most of it has nothing to do with urban development. Most of it’s just because you don’t need the land. The amount of land we have for agriculture is so great that about 50 percent of the annual income of farmers in the U.S. is government subsidy, because we just don’t need all of that food.”

Sprawl is bad for the environment: “What the farmer will do is take the land and strip off the native, natural vegetation, expose the land to all the elements, plant it with a monoculture and then douse it with chemicals,” he says. “It’s hard for me to see how that’s a particularly environmentally sensitive use of the land. By comparison, low-density suburban or exurban development will have much greater biomass, much greater species diversity, and much less impact on the land.”

Sprawl is ugly: “Most people are so sure that strip malls and big-box retail are bad, but what we find ugly today, we may not in the future,” Bruegmann says. “Exactly the same criticism was made about fast food joints and service stations 50 years ago. Now, if you have a service station that’s over 50 years old, or you have an intact McDonald’s, it’s so interesting, it’s novel, it’s quaint. You might not call it beautiful, but you’re likely not to call it ugly anymore.”

Sprawl is racist: In many Southern cities, it’s true, whites fled city centers in the 1960s, but the pattern of out-migration in cities with minimal African-American populations, such as Minneapolis, was exactly the same, Bruegmann says. What’s more, he adds, “Blacks move out of the city the same way whites do, when they have the chance, because nobody wants to be in neighborhoods with crime and bad schools. Those are problems that need to be fixed, but I simply don’t believe that forcing people back into the city is the answer.”

Overall, Bruegmann contends, sprawl is a natural, historic, worldwide process of decentralization that’s been going on at least since ancient Rome and China, when the wealthy got away from the bustle and noise of city centers by building homes in outlying areas. More recently in the United States, he says, sprawl is essentially democratic. “Sprawl is largely the result of people of the middle class and even the working class getting what once only the wealthy had: single-family houses and private transportation.”

A ‘skewed’ history If your head is spinning from reading the above, you aren’t alone. Sprawl: A Compact History is the subject of a furious assault by liberal/progressive “smart growth” advocates, New Urbanists and anti-sprawl bloggers, some of whom admit they haven’t read the book. Even some critics who concede the book is refreshingly thought-provoking call it distressingly one-sided.

“It’s an interesting history but a skewed one,” says Ruth Knack, executive editor of Planning magazine, the monthly publication of the American Planning Association. “For one thing, Bob essentially equates early suburban development with the sprawl we have today, but in fact, what we have today is far different from what we had in the past in this country and in Europe. The big difference is that the early suburban development was along streetcar and then rail lines. It was a walking kind of development that didn’t impinge on the countryside the way development does today.”

As for Bruegmann’s contention that the loss of farmland in Illinois and other parts of the U.S. isn’t a serious problem, Knack says: “The reason those farms were here to begin with is that this is the best land, and we’re losing it. And what about the so-called slow-food movement, and the popularity of farmer’s markets – where is that produce going to come from?”

Knack is equally skeptical of another of Bruegmann’s central ideas: that sprawl is an expression of personal decisions by millions of individuals who are merely exercising their freedom to choose where to live.

“That sounds good, but when people actually get out to the suburbs, especially if they don’t have a lot of money, they find that they have few choices – about how to get around, for example,” she says. “Often the only way to get anywhere is to drive. And there’s the fact that there really isn’t enough affordable housing in the suburbs, which leads to pockets of income and racial segregation. As suburban governments go for more expensive housing, that leaves the poor out in the cold.”

Then there are the aesthetic and cultural concerns that some can’t shrug off as easily as Bruegmann does. “There’s a certain contrarian glee that Bob takes in goring sacred cows, and I think there’s value in challenging us to look at these issues fresh,” says Ned Cramer, curator of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. “But I don’t think I can set aside my prejudices about the vacuousness of life in suburban sprawl. Gertrude Stein said, ‘There’s no there there,’ and I still on an emotional, psychological and intellectual level fail to find any ‘there’ in the vast majority of sprawl-style developments that I visit and have lived in. And it’s interesting that Bob lives and works in a traditional city. I don’t see him moving to Aurora.”

An ‘iconoclastic little book’ Still, the early critical response to Bruegmann’s book has been mostly positive, with reviewers such as Witold Rybczynski, the architecture critic of the online magazine Slate, lauding Sprawl as an “iconoclastic little book” that “demonstrates that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities.” Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman is equally enthusiastic.

“The intellectual perception of sprawl is a snobbish one that says it’s all crap, and Bob points out that it just ain’t that way,” Tigerman says. “It’s not a black-and-white topic – in fact it’s terribly complex – and he goes through it all in a compelling argument that’s going to have a huge popular appeal. I’m not saying that Bob is a messiah and has all the answers, but it’s a really refreshing second look at what’s happening.”

knance@suntimes.com

Alex Krieger

CommonWealth

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Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History is a good and timely book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in cities or general patterns of human settlement. The book is meticulously researched, ambitious in scope, well reasoned, and enjoyable to read. It offers a carefully balanced, non-polemical overview of a subject much polemicized in recent times. I even enjoy the witty title.

Unfortunately, and for some of the same reasons, I predict that few will extol the book’s virtues, because few today feel neutral about sprawl, or seek a balanced argument on behalf of sprawled America. Sprawl’s legion of condemners will express outrage, and find Bruegmann irresponsible. They will ask: How can anyone in this day and age, especially an eminent historian of urbanization, defend the destructive impacts of sprawl? Whereas the defenders of sprawl, in the minority today but quite outspoken on the subject of protecting property rights, will regret that the book is not more of a manifesto on their side.

Bruegmann stops short of championing sprawl in all of its manifestations, though he enumerates the many social and economic benefits from low-density urbanization. Still, he acknowledges that decentralized growth also yields less positive consequences for society. His principal shots across the bow of the anti-sprawl movement are threefold: First, he rejects today’s pervasive idea that sprawl has and continues to be forced upon Americans by some complicit combination of careless public policy, corporate marketing (namely the auto industry), and greedy land developers and homebuilders. He argues that the majority of Americans, and others across the world to whom similar choices are available, actually like the less dense environments they inhabit. People surely prefer the sprawl of their own making, though Bruegmann admits that those enjoying their own sprawl increasingly object to the sprawl being produced by newcomer neighbors.

Second, and as a partial rebuttal to the idea that sprawl is forced upon us, Bruegmann points to preferences for sprawl across cultures and across history. His command of urban history yields numerous examples of horizontal urban spread, from ancient Rome to the capitals of contemporary Europe. He makes a compelling case that in many cultures it is affluence, with its resulting expansion of available dwelling choices, that leads to peripheral urban expansion. It is hard to deny that members of the traditional three “Ps”—the powerful, the privileged, and the pious (as in popes and cardinals)—consistently succumbed to the temptation of building villas and estates out in the countryside. So why, he asks, is it so odd to assume that similar choices would not be taken advantage of in the modern era, once resources and technologies made it possible, first by members of the merchant and business classes and finally by you and me? Some anthropologists even theorize that humanity is biologically wired to thrive in, or be attracted to, smaller social groupings and natural settings, rather than enormous congregations of population. So Bruegmann intimates, as others have done, that the highly compact, dense, 19th-century industrial city—the city that aroused Charles Dickens’s ire, not admiration—may have been an aberrant form of human settlement, rather than a model for contemporary urbanization, as some sentimentally assert.

Third, Bruegmann sets out to challenge some of today’s near-hysterical claims about the destructive impacts of sprawl. He would like to detoxify the term, and in part does so by accounting for its various definitions, meanings that shift across time and across perspectives on suburbanization. He reminds us that for much of American history, from Jefferson’s time on, decentralization was considered progressive, a social good, and a measure of citizens’ economic advancement, the opposite of a major social problem. And he points out that such mental associations still exist, and continue to support the sprawling instinct.

he book is organized into three parts. The first six chapters Bruegmann uses to establish his position, outlining the difficulties of defining sprawl exactly, reviewing its many causes, challenging some of the accusations made by opponents, and offering examples of its persistence across urban history. Thus, he methodically defends sprawl against the common supposition that it is unique to our time. The next four chapters are dedicated to a series of anti-sprawl campaigns over time. These include the arguments against urban spread made in Britain during the 1920s, when London was one of the world’s largest and most spread-out cities; reactions in America, largely from academics, planners, and other “elites,” against the rapid suburbanization in the post–World War II period; and finally the current campaign, accelerating in intensity since the late 1970s and maturing today under labels such as New Urbanism and “smart growth,” the campaign that surely motivated him to write this book. But all these he sees as merely recurring arguments: “[V]irtually every argument leveled against sprawl today can be found in [the] description of London and other European industrial cities in the nineteenth century.” Later, he refers further back in history still—for example, to Queen Elizabeth’s effort in the 16th century to prohibit building at the edges of London, a prohibition that, of course, had little long-term effect.

The final three chapters are devoted to what he terms remedies for sprawl, and he points out their very limited success. On these pages he rightly notes the inevitability of winners and losers from any substantial efforts to control land use and urbanization. He acknowledges that centralized government authority can control urban expansion, citing the success of Soviet Moscow’s efforts to control peripheral growth, but questions whether such success outweighs the disadvantages caused by limiting citizens’ choices. He offers a lengthy and thoughtful assessment of America’s most famous metropolitan effort at controlling sprawl, the case of Portland, Ore. While acknowledging the courage of the effort, he generally sides with skeptics who wonder whether it has been the growth boundary measures or the generally slow regional population growth of Portland, compared with Houston or Phoenix over the same time period, that has helped retain many of the urbane characteristics that advocates of Portland’s livability cite. He notes that the overall density of the Portland metro area is significantly lower than that of Los Angeles, the longstanding poster child for uncontrolled sprawl. And he worries, as others recently have, about various inequities that may have been inadvertent consequences of land-use policies, such as the rapid increase in land values—or the decline in transit usage following the switch from bus lines to light rail systems, a move that actually reduced the percentage of the population with convenient access to transit. Though it took place after his book was finished, I am sure Bruegmann was not surprised by the victory of last year’s referendum in Oregon that seeks monetary compensation for landowners outside the growth boundary, who claim a loss of value to their land. This is generally seen as a serious backlash to Portland’s generations-long experiment in regional land-use controls.

While I generally admire Bruegmann’s nuanced review of the causes and the appeal of sprawl, and while I concur with his supposition that there is a certain inevitability to the horizontal spread of urban populations, I do fault him for remaining all too silent on sprawl’s consumptive nature. Low-density settlement may be appealing to those who enjoy the lifestyle or profit from it, whether real estate moguls or individual homeowners, but it is hardly an efficient use of land or the world’s resources. And the cumulative burden upon the environment of pervasive urban sprawl cannot be wished away by its popular appeal. There is a not insignificant problem of multiplication that Bruegmann chooses to ignore. If 300 million Americans choose to sprawl, much less a billion affluence-and-freedom-gaining Chinese, that is quite a different matter than several thousand Englishmen planting themselves on the outskirts of 16th-century London.

Worldwide environmental degradation has many causes, but sprawl is certainly a contributor. Few can argue that low-density development does not increase auto emissions, water use, pollution, trash, loss of species habitat, and energy consumption. To cite but one example, most pollution of groundwater, lakes, streams, and rivers in the United States is caused by runoff, which collects various toxins on impervious surfaces, like roads and parking lots, in urbanized regions. The heating and cooling of freestanding homes, with their high number of exterior walls per capita, require more energy than denser, attached dwellings. And then there are those immaculate lawns, which require ample water and chemicals to maintain. Of course, such conditions are caused by increasing affluence, not just settlement patterns, though affluence and sprawl are related, as Bruegmann consistently points out. But in emphasizing that relationship, Bruegmann remains a little too sanguine about the environmental consequences. A billion sprawlers is cause for worry.

Even as detached homes with wide lawns retain their appeal in an increasingly affluent society, there is little doubt that calls for better environmental stewardship—including legislated restrictions on development—will increase in the coming decades, influencing urbanization patterns considerably, at least in the developed world. Bruegmann’s courageous narrative would have even more force had he concluded, even as he articulated the historic benefits of sprawl, that the coming era—what some hope will be the “Green Millennium”—needs to unfold freer of sprawl than the prior one.

Alex Krieger is a co-founding principal of Chan Krieger & Associates, an architecture and urban design firm located in Cambridge, and a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

James Howard Kunstler

Salmagundi (Fall 2006, No. 152), the quarterly journal of humanities and social sciences of Skidmore College

Fall 2006

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There is a species of fatuous thinking these days in America which states, in so many words, that suburbia is fine and dandy because so many people like it. Variations on this theme range from the idea that suburbia is the highest expression of free markets, to the notion that it is the natural outcome of our democracy, to the belief that God has ordained it. This has been the reasoning of some public intellectuals such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, Joel Kotkin, of the New America Foundation, and the preposterous Peter Huber of Forbes Magazine and the Manhattan Institute. Now Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois, Chicago, weighs in from academia with essentially the same argument floated on barges of statistical analysis.

That so many editors, foundation board members, and deans of faculty allow this obvious casuistry to pass as thinking at all says a lot about what a nation of morons we have become, and how deep the intellectual rot runs. The various above-named characters may differ somewhat in style, but they all employ the same specious logic in support of the status quo. Brooks functions as a cheerleader for successful yuppies like himself wishing to justify the blandishments they enjoy in going along with the suburban program. Kotkin is a highly-paid consultant to municipal governments who use him to rationalize the pernicious effects of their engrained practices. Huber gives aid and comfort to those who regard the public interest in any form as an affront to private gain. And now along comes Bob Bruegmann seeking to lend the imprimatur of empiricism to these arguments, so as to valiantly prove wrong for once and for all the peevish critics of suburbia (including yours truly) by driving the wooden stake of science through our superstitious and sentimental hearts.

Despite his boatloads of statistics, Bruegmann is just flat-out wrong in many of his positions and virtually all of his conclusions. At the center of his thesis is the unquestioned assumption that the suburban project can continue indefinitely, that it is a good thing, that we will get more of it, and we ought to stop carping and enjoy it. His book fails entirely to acknowledge the fact that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis that will put an end to the drive-in utopia whether people like it or not. This singular harsh fact obviates all the rationalizations brought to the quixotic defense of suburbia. What Bruegmann and his homies overlook is that American-style suburbia, aka sprawl, was an emergent, self-organizing system made possible only by lavish and exorbitant supplies of cheap fossil fuels, and once those conditions no longer obtain, not only will there be no further elaboration of this development pattern, but all the existing stuff built according to that pattern – which comprises more than eighty percent of everything ever built in America – will drastically lose its usefulness and its relative “market” value. What’s more, the discontinuities-to-come in the global energy picture will pose challenges so severe to industrial society that we will be lucky to salvage anything resembling civilized life altogether.

It is necessary to insert right here that, contrary to a lot of wishful thinking and techgnostic wool-gathering rampant these days, no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to run America the way we currently run it, or even a substantial fraction of it. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, and the interstate highway system on hydrogen, coal synfuels, tar sand or oil shale distillates, bio-diesel, ethanol, recycled french-fry oil, solar electricity, wind power, or nuclear fission. The stark truth of the situation is that we are simply going to have to make other arrangements – and I’m sorry to have to repeat that this will be the case whether we like it or not. Suburbia will be coming off the menu. We will no longer be able to resort to the stupid argument that it is okay because we chose it.

Another very troubling aspect of Bruegmann’s book is that his statistical salvos fail to address altogether the many questions of quality and character in our everyday environments. The sad truth is that most of America has come to be composed of places that are not worth caring about, and they may eventually (if not already) add up to a nation not worth defending, or a culture not worth carrying on. You can cite the population figures and density trend lines all day long and never come to the conclusion that Hackensack, New Jersey, has become a soul-sapping sinkhole of auto-centric crap with strikingly poor prospects for maintaining its value or utility in the not-too-distant future.

When it is convenient, Bruegmann claims that the statistical analysis of his opponents fails to tell the story correctly. He writes:

“We can use the Chicago area as a typical example. For years, sprawl opponents trumpeted the “fact” that between 1970 and 1990 the metropolitan area grew in population by only 4 percent, but grew in land by 46 percent. This kind of statistic, juxtaposed with a photograph of a new subdivision under construction in a cornfield conjures up images of a juggernaut moving inexorably across the countryside, flattening farms and forest, replacing country roads with highways lined with wall-to-wall strip centers and an endless sprawl of large lot subdivisions. . . . Even if the figures were accurate, they would not necessarily represent a crisis. There is no shortage of land in Illinois.”

All this promiscuous marshalling of statistics really demonstrates is that the story is hardly about statistics anymore than it is about the magical operations of markets or the wonders of democracy. The appropriate lesson of the sprawl era is that societies can make extremely unfortunate collective decisions, and the losses incurred are irreversible. This is really the central conflict between the sprawl champions and those of us who do not view sprawl as any kind of boon. Sprawl is, and always has been, to put it as plainly as possible, a living arrangement with no future – and to regard it as anything else is a disservice to our fate.

It is self-evident that human beings enjoy living in settings of domesticated nature – and no accident that the archetype for this is the Garden of Eden – but note that there is no mention of parking lots in the standard accounts of it. The suburbia of our time, which even Bruegmann identifies as “sprawl,” is something of a new and different order, not adequately described by sheer compilations of numbers. Because he is allergic to any consideration of the non-empirical, Bruegmann manages to misunderstand some important elements of the suburb in history. Yes, it is true that ancient Rome had extensive suburbs. It was an urban organism of roughly a million people in the time of Trajan and a substantial elite occupied villas in its hinterlands. They did it because they could – because this elite enjoyed fabulous imperial wealth, and because the enormous power of the empire allowed civil security to extend outside the city, indeed throughout Italy, where wealth enjoyed protection. Even the mild weather of the region favored these arrangements. But was life there comparable in quality and character to Hackensack? And what kind of empirical data might demonstrate the difference? You could say that suburban Romans owned fewer automobiles per capita as compared to the denizens of Hackensack, and that would be correct – but would it be meaningful?

When Rome fell apart, nothing like it was seen again until the beginning of the early industrial age. The gothic, medieval, and even Renaissance cities were designed more or less as extensive fortifications because political security was so dicey, and to be outside the protective walls was not advantageous. The industrial age marked a sharp change in the organization of cities and their relations to their hinterlands. The differences in the development of the industrial cities themselves has a pertinence to the consequent development of suburbs that Bruegmann seems to misconstrue. He writes:

“In nineteenth century, London exploded outward as developers threw up mile upon miles of brick terrace houses. . . . The resulting cityscape horrified highbrow British critics of the time, who considered the new districts to be vulgar, cheap, and monotonous. Nevertheless, the houses continued to be built because so many middle class inhabitants of central London saw them as a vast step upward for their families. In the second half of the twentieth century, highbrow opinion came around, and today they are widely considered to be the very model of compact urban life. Ironically, they are today often considered the antithesis of sprawl.”

The redevelopment of Paris in the same period took a quite different form. The heroic renovation of the city by Louis Napoleon and George Eugene Haussmann, the prefect (i.e. mayor) of the city, was based typologically on the apartment building for the growing middle class rather than the private row house. These apartment buildings, generally seven stories and under, were zoned vertically by income, with the wealthy occupying the lower floors above the shop fronts and the less well-off above them, and finally servants and poor folk tucked under the mansard roofs. The result was a substantially different quality of city life, more compact and lively than London, with people of all social ranks thrown into proximity, and a rich mix of culture and commerce at street level. Returning to compare them today, in the 21st century, one could easily conclude that the seemingly endless, sprawling, row house neighborhoods of London are indeed monotonous to an extreme, tending to be income-segregated ghettos, with retail services and cultural amenity deployed often at an inconvenient remove.

In American cities, you got a mix of both patterns. New York went crazy for Paris-style apartment living and eventually elaborated it into the skyscraper, while other places like Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore stuck almost exclusively to the row house. In Chicago and San Francisco, you got some of both. In any case, the industrial growth of American cities was furious and resulted in an urban ecology with the ambience of a gigantic machine. Little of the pre-industrial scale survived, and once you got west of Chicago, it barely existed in the first place. The ensuing discomfort and revulsion inspired an intense nostalgia for the non-city, for country living, for the garden. Rural land outside these American cities was plentiful, cheap, and unencumbered by entailments beyond fee-simple ownership. So as the Civil War concluded, the new railroads facilitated a ready escape from the awful industrial city into the hinterlands and the American suburbs were born.

The suburban evolutionary sequence moved quickly from the railroad through the brief but exuberant streetcar phase to the drive-in utopia based on universal democratic car ownership, and the development pattern changed with it. Eventually, it resolved into the dendritic roadway system we see today, of cul-de-sac income-segregated housing tracts, commercial collector boulevards with the familiar chain retail, and the activity pods of the mall and the office park, tied together by limited access freeways – all of it predicated on the rationalized insanity of single-use zoning.

The automobile and all of its requisite infrastructure, of course, would not have developed the way it did without ready supplies of cheap oil, and America coincidentally had vast supplies easily obtainable inside our own borders. Europe had to rely on much more distant supplies of oil. Meanwhile, their societies were savagely disrupted by two world wars, with after-effects lasting for decades. On top of that, they had age-old land-tenure laws that did not favor real estate subdivisions. So, it was not so easy for them to suburbanize. They got into the game late, never enjoyed cheap gasoline, and did not sprawl even close to the extent that we did, or the way we did – a point that Bruegmann obscures with a blizzard of statistics about relative city densities in late 20th century Europe that would have the reader think that the Ile de France today is not substantially different from Nassau County, Long Island.

Something strange happened to American suburbia as it went through its phases of development. It started out as country living, the sovereign antidote to the industrial city. Then it became a rigorously domesticated variant of country living. Then, after World War Two it mutated into something insidiously different: a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of the country (in a cartoon of a country house). This sad fact explains why the chronic disappointment of suburbia inspires ridicule even among those who live in it. It hasn’t delivered very well on its promises for a long time now. In its florid, climactic incarnation today – the McMansion precincts of Dallas, Atlanta, or Northern Virginia – it presents the worst elements of urban and rural life in the same package, with few of the benefits of either. The megaburbs have all the congestion of a city and none of the human contact. They have all of the isolation of the country, but no real connection to nature.

The issue at the heart of Bruegmann’s book is whether this is, after all, a good thing. He writes:

“. . . sprawl has been beneficial for many people. . . . Even where sprawl has created negative consequences, moreover, there seems to be very little evidence that for most people sprawl itself has precipitated any kind of crisis. The vast majority of Americans have responded to a whole battery of polls year after year saying that they are quite happy with where they live. . . .I would argue that worries about sprawl have become so important not because conditions are really bad, as critics suggest, but precisely because conditions are so good.”

What Bruegmann leaves out of the picture is the same thing that the mandarins of American municipal planning have left out for half a century: any consideration of quality and character of place, and the means for achieving it. This is evinced most dramatically in the issue of the public realm, the part of our everyday world that belongs to everybody and that everyone ought to have access to most of the time. In postwar America, the public realm was trashed, relegated purely to the needs of the automobile until America became a nearly uniform automobile slum from sea to shining sea. It didn’t even matter whether you were in a rich place or a poor place anymore – the parking lots of Beverly Hills weren’t any more rewarding to the human spirit than the parking lots of Hackensack. More to the point perhaps, the very methods of the municipal planners, which produced the ghastly sprawl environments of our time, are based on exactly the same kind of statistical methods employed by Bruegmann, instead of the one thing that might have mitigated or constrained the mess, namely artistry in design.

The public realm has two crucial roles in our collective existence. First, it is the physical manifestation of the common good. Second, is literally the dwelling place of civic life. And so if you fail to design the public realm with deliberate artistry, and by so doing degrade and dishonor the public realm by turning it into a uniform automobile slum simply to accommodate x-number of cars, you will automatically degrade the quality of civic life and the public’s collective ability to conceive of a common good beyond incessant motoring. These are issues which do not yield to strict empiricism and cannot be comprehended by it. The result in American suburbia today is a set of places where private luxury is exalted and public space is grievously dishonored, damaged, and diminished, places where there are more bathrooms per inhabitant than any other society on earth, but where public space is so debased that the only place children can find to play beyond their back yards is the berm between the WalMart and the Winn Dixie.

We flatter ourselves to think that the shopping malls are an adequate substitute for real main streets. We saw an interesting case locally here a couple of years ago, in Albany, New York’s Crossgates Mall, where a man bought a T-shirt in one of the mall’s shops with an anti-war slogan printed on it, and was then arrested for wearing it in the mall corridor when security guards hassled him and called the police.

Because Bruegmann’s analysis omits entirely the issues of physical form and its quality, it cannot comprehend the additional problem with suburbia today: that it is a development pattern with no future because of the looming global energy crisis. All matters pertaining to physical form Bruegmann wrongly identifies (and denigrates) as “aesthetic” issues. This allows him to argue that physical form (including development patterns) are simply differences in taste, which takes us back to the fallacy that an appraisal of suburbia is simply a sum of opinions, or a set of poll numbers, or the mere fact that at a given time in history, any number of people chose tragically to invest their life savings in a particular kind of house because they mistakenly believed that current conditions would continue forever.

We’re about to find out the hard way that life is tragic and history is merciless and that reality doesn’t care what we like or don’t like. The suburban system we have come to think of as “sprawl” is going to fail spectacularly. We will be desperate to make other arrangements, and all the statistical bullshit in the world will not avail us to bargain our way around it. The global oil crisis we face, in combination with climate change, is about to bring on perhaps the greatest discontinuity that the human race has ever faced. If there are any historians left to unearth this book centuries from now, they will marvel that anyone ever thought that simply liking something was enough to guarantee its existence.

Jay Tolson

US News & World Report

January 30, 2006

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A Call to Rethink Sprawl

The unruly expanse of subdivisions, malls, office parks, and congested roadways spreading far beyond the old urban centers has come to be known—and often condemned—as sprawl. But does sprawl deserve such a bad rap? Robert Bruegmann, a professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois-Chicago, talked to U.S. News about his own distinctive take on the subject, set forth in his new book, Sprawl: A Compact History.

Sprawl is a loaded word. How do you define it?

I try to define the word in the most objective way possible, as relatively low-density settlement without any overarching master planning.

Is sprawl a modern phenomenon?

It goes back at least as far as we have historical records of cities and seems to be a reaction to the reality that, from the earliest days up to very recently, cities have been extremely dense—up to about 150,000 people per square mile in most of the larger ones. Cities had to be very compact because the main way of getting around was walking, and also, up until recently, cities had to have walls to protect them from attacks. The wall was a crushing financial burden, so cities had to be built at absolute maximum density to cut down on these tremendous costs of defense. This density was something people wanted to avoid because of all the pollution and congestion. But the only people who could take advantage of less densely settled areas beyond the city walls were the very powerful and wealthy members of society. If you were a very wealthy Roman, you could have a villa at Herculaneum or on the seashore.

So what is new about sprawl in the past two centuries?

A much larger percentage of society, including the middle class and then later the working class, has been able to afford to live in the same way that the wealthy and powerful once did.

What are some of the major arguments against sprawl?

The four major ones are that it’s economically inefficient, that it’s socially inequitable, that it is environmentally degrading, and that it’s aesthetically ugly.

How well do these arguments hold up?

I find them weak. True, you have a slight premium in the amount of money it takes to build sewers and roads if you have people living at lower densities, but so much of that cost is now being transferred directly to homeowners. If they can pay for it, why shouldn’t they have it? Then, too, as more and more people telecommute, you have a revolution in the way people live that will be much more energy efficient and less polluting than living at very high densities. Socially, it is true that the suburbanizing trend has left a heavy concentration of minority and poor people at the center of cities. But thinking you can stop social problems by bottling everybody up in the city seems to be an unworkable solution when you see even within the city we can’t solve the inequities. The aesthetic arguments generate the most heat. The important thing to remember is that every generation’s sprawl is the next generation’s historic landmarks.

You argue that it’s wrong to call Los Angeles the epitome of sprawl.

Los Angeles was the poster child for sprawl for a good 50 years, but the density levels of the Los Angeles metropolitan area went from about 4,000 people per square mile in 1950 to just over 7,000 people per square mile in 2000, which makes it by far the densest urbanized area in North America. The problems we see in L.A. today—the congestion and some of the pollution—are really the problems of increasing density without increasing in any commensurate way the road system. And by the way, L.A. has one of the lowest per capita miles of superhighway in the country.

Is it true that European nations are relatively free of sprawl?

Paris has certainly sprawled as much as any American city. It’s amazing to me that so little attention has been paid to the fact that European cities, first in the north but also more recently in the south in places like Barcelona and Naples, have decentralized in really dramatic fashion. And efforts by European governments to control or limit sprawl, as with London’s greenbelt plan, have not really succeeded.

Portland, Ore., is often cited as the U.S. model of antisprawl smart growth.

Portland is still a very low-density city at little more than 3,000 people per square mile. With all the efforts not to build highways but to build transit instead, the percentage of ridership on transit continues to decline, and, of course, congestion has increased because they haven’t built roads to keep up.

What are the benefits of sprawl?

The most important thing about sprawl is that it has given to millions and millions of people the kind of privacy, mobility, and choice that was once the privilege of a very small number of people.

Mathew E. Kahn, Tufts University

The Journal of Economic History (2006), 66: 252-253 Cambridge University Press

March 17, 2006

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Published online by Cambridge University Press 17 Mar 2006

Sprawl: A Compact History. By Robert Bruegmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 301. $27.50.

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Today, most Americans who live in metropolitan areas live in single-family detached homes and commute to work by automobile. New York City is America’s sole urban center where a significant fraction of the population lives in apartment buildings, works downtown, and commutes by public transit. We are choosing to live and work in the suburbs. But, this trend has triggered a “cost of sprawl” literature that posits that there are many unintended consequences of the pursuit of the “American Dream” that range from increased traffic congestion, urban air pollution, greenhouse gas production, farmland paving, to reducing center city tax revenues, and denying the urban poor access to employment opportunities.

In this book, Robert Bruegmann revels in playing the contrarian. In his opinion, sprawl opponents have too often dominated the debate. Bruegmann attempts to level the playing field by arguing that sprawl offers many benefits. “It has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful.” (front book flap).

The book is organized around three broad chronologies. The first five chapters describe “sprawl across the centuries.” In chapters 7 through 10, Bruegmann presents an excellent investigation of the intellectual history of the antisprawl movement. “Not incidentally, it was exactly at this point, when the automobile ceased to be a luxury item for the affluent and came into the hands of a large middle class, that the anti-automobile sentiment grew really strident” (p. 130). The final three chapters of the book offer a history of anti-sprawl policies ranging from London’s Greenbelt to recent Smart Growth efforts in the United States.

Bruegmann also seeks to explain why sprawl has taken place. A short chapter 6 is devoted to this task. This is the book’s weakest link. Bruegmann is a historian of architecture, landscape, and the built environment. He is not an empirical microeconomist. He engages in a peculiar form of hypothesis testing. If he can name a counter-example, he dismisses a potential cause of sprawl. Most economists would seek to set up an econometric test to run a “horse race” of alternative explanations. For example, do we see greater sprawl in cities that have had worse urban riots in the past? Do we see greater sprawl in cities that have built more highways? Bruegmann chooses not to pursue this strategy and in the end he declares “In the case of urban areas and sprawl, as in the case of virtually any vast and complicated human or natural system, there is very little simple cause and effect. Rather, there are innumerable forces, always acting on each other in complex and unpredictable ways” (p. 112).

Bruegmann presents an evenhanded overview of what are the benefits and costs of sprawl. But, the debate over sprawl’s merits hinge on how large are the benefits and costs of this trend. To answer this question requires some investigation of the existing empirical literature. As demonstrated by the smash success of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005) statistical analysis can increase book sales! Permit me to offer two examples where insights from the applied economics literature would have informed this cost/benefit analysis. To measure the benefits of sprawl, we need some measure of the consumer surplus that home buyers gain from purchasing a new, spacious suburban home at a reasonably low price. To measure one piece of the environmental costs of sprawl, we need an estimate of how many extra gallons of gasoline do suburban drivers consume relative to similar center city residents.

Unfortunately, Bruegmann is unwilling to get down and dirty to help the reader digest the existing empirical evidence that has been generated by economists, urban planners, and geographers. For example, consider this vague quote concerning the environmental consequences of sprawl. “For our present purposes, the first and most important question is whether global warming is necessarily linked to sprawl. Although low-density living has undoubtedly been accompanied by more miles of driving and more energy use per capita and this in turn has led to production of more greenhouse gases, it is certainly not clear that sprawl itself is the culprit” (p. 149).

For broad readers interested in urban history, this book is fun and worth reading. I greatly appreciated the author’s highly engaging and clear writing style. The book’s photographs and endnotes are highly informative. For teachers, this book will be a useful supplemental reading in a variety of undergraduate courses ranging from urban history to urban economics. Many undergraduates interested in long-run trends will be captivated by this book’s ideas. This book highlights the importance of adopting a historical perspective when thinking about an important current policy issue.

Vincent J. Cannato

The Weekly Standard Volume 011, Issue 25

March 20, 2006

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Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann Chicago, 301 pp., $27.50

SPRAWL. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say most critics. Browsing through a university library catalog recently, I found over 20 books on sprawl published since just 2000. Nearly every one of them takes a dim view of the subject, their titles oozing with doom, outrage, dismay, or some combination thereof: Road to Ruin: An Introduction to Sprawl and How to Cure It; Up Against the Sprawl; City Limits: Putting the Brakes on Sprawl; Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health and Money; and It’s a Sprawl World After All: The Human Cost of Unplanned Growth–and Visions of a Better Future. You get the idea.

So one might have low expectations for Robert Bruegmann’s recent contribution to the literature. Yet this book is a refreshing antidote to the avalanche of pessimism emanating from the so-called sprawl debate. As Bruegmann writes in his introduction, it seemed as if “so many ‘right-minded’ people were so vociferous on the subject [of the perils of sprawl] that I began to suspect that there must be something suspicious about the argument itself.” He approaches the topic with some much-needed skepticism toward these “right-minded” critics and adds a healthy dose of nondogmatic libertarianism to the mix. The result is an eminently readable and rational book.

What is sprawl? Bruegmann, a professor of art history and architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, defines it as “low-density, scattered, urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land-use planning.” Critics charge sprawl with all manner of sin: causing global warming, pollution, and the depletion of natural resources, aiding the nation’s so-called obesity crisis, increasing economic and racial inequality, destroying the family farm, and despoiling open spaces, killing off American cities, encouraging “big-box” retailers like Wal-Mart who underpay their workers and kill “mom-and-pop” businesses, and creating conformist communities whose residents neglect the public interest for their own personal “privatopia.” On top of that, they argue, suburban sprawl is just plain ugly.

The ideology of the anti-sprawl camp is easy to pare down to basics. Cars and roads are bad, public transportation is good. Low-density development is bad, high density is good. Local government is bad. Regional or metropolitan government is good. Private, “unplanned” development driven by the market is bad. Planned development according to the dreams of urban planners is good. Cities are the apex of American civilization and society. Suburbs and exurbs are drab, conformist, and politically reactionary.

Sprawl: A Compact History tugs at nearly every aspect of the anti-sprawl critique and finds many of the theories wanting. Bruegmann also places the issue within the larger historical context. He attempts to show that dispersal from high-density core areas to low-density outer areas is a phenomenon common not just to modern America, but also ancient Rome and 19th-century England. He also argues that sprawl is not simply a phenomenon found in free-market-mad America, but also in more “noble” societies like Europe, Canada, and South America.

We think of central Paris as a wonderful example of how to emphasize high-density urban living, but Bruegmann notes that, between 1962 and 1990, Paris’s population dropped by more than a half-million, and saw its population dwarfed by its inner and outer suburbs, filled with single-family homes, industrial parks, and shopping centers. “By 1999,” writes Bruegmann, the larger Parisian metropolitan area known as “Ile-de-France had nearly 10 million people, meaning that the city of Paris accounted for fewer than a quarter of all Parisians.”

So what really lies behind the arguments against sprawl? Bruegmann seems to pinpoint the issue. Although suburban sprawl, like any other social or economic trend, creates it own set of issues, “the driving force behind the complaints at any period seems to have been a set of class-based aesthetic and metaphysical assumptions, almost always present but rarely discussed.”

Although the current sprawl debate dates back to the mid-1990s, it’s really a much older story. The crusade against sprawl is merely the latest saga of the battle against suburbia that began in the 1920s, blossomed in postwar America, and continues with today’s jeremiads against sprawl. It was not until after World War II that suburbia became a mass phenomenon. Thanks to a booming economy, lower down payments, and the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill, even working-class Americans could afford a suburban home. And that seems to have set off much of the criticism. Lewis Mumford captured the feeling when he wrote that suburbia was not much of a problem when it “served only a favored minority . . . But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy the value of both environments without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form and even more devoid of the original suburban values.” John Keats published his famous satire of suburbia in 1956 called The Crack in the Picture Window, featuring suburban residents John and Mary Drone. And when counterculture icon and self-styled man of the people Pete Seeger sang about working-class suburban housing, they were “little boxes of ticky tacky.” So much for the “people.”

The biggest flaw of Bruegmann’s book is also its strength. In writing a readable and brief (under 300 pages) review of the current literature and history of suburbia and sprawl, Bruegmann often gives a cursory gloss on some of the arguments against suburban sprawl. A huge ideological infrastructure has gone up to prove the evils of suburban and exurban development and the American government’s complicity in creating it. It will take more than one short book to tear the house down. But Bruegmann’s history is a start–as is the work of Joel Kotkin and a few others.

Just a few of the conclusions that Bruegmann makes about sprawl are: commuting times nationwide have not increased dramatically; Los Angeles, often seen as the epitome of sprawl, is actually one of the densest cities in America; densities in most American cities have either leveled off or are increasing; and automobile use in mass-transit-friendly Europe is quickly catching up to American levels. Bruegmann reminds us that, for years, planners and reformers complained not of low-density sprawl, but of high-density urban settlements. These overcrowded city neighborhoods were seen as incubators of disease, crime, and poverty by progressive reformers. It is no wonder most residents of these areas left for greener and more spacious pastures.

Bruegmann is also skeptical of the conventional wisdom among historians that federal policies, like the FHA, interstate highway system, and federal homeowner tax deduction, helped favor suburbs over cities. He also downplays racism as a factor, noting that black city residents have been just as interested in moving to the suburbs as their white counterparts. In fact, today, immigrant melting pots are more often found in suburbs and exurbs than in big cities. (I recently visited a strip mall in Rockville, Maryland, a classic sprawl community, where a halal meat shop was next to a flower store owned by Indians and across the street from a Peruvian chicken restaurant.)

As for Portland, Oregon–the Holy Grail for anti-sprawlers–Bruegmann devotes a large section to it. Portland is often touted as a model for “smart growth,” with a highly planned urban center linked to radial town centers by mass transit, with lots of land set aside outside the city for green space. To opponents, Portland’s policies have made land more expensive, creating an upper-middle-class amusement park while pushing sprawl further out beyond the urban growth boundary for those unable to afford Portland. Bruegmann is fairly agnostic on the Portland experiment–it is a beautiful city, after all–but notes its smart growth proposals are not likely to be exported to other cities with much success.

While some critics of sprawl are residents of areas affected by such growth, most of the intellectual and policy critiques are driven by other reasons. The anti-suburb and anti-sprawl literature betrays a growing alienation of some of the New Class from modern American society, as it continually bumps up against reality. “Within the past several decades, many of the people who still think of themselves as progressive have turned pessimistic,” Bruegmann writes, “and have concluded that things have actually gotten worse rather than better.” As a result, they want to limit growth (actual and economic) and wax nostalgic for an older way of life.

There is more to the debate over sprawl than just anti-Wal-Mart hysteria and anger over traffic. At heart, it’s about politics, broadly speaking. The decentralizing trends in living and working patterns, first in suburbs and later in exurbs, have been deeply problematic for the Democratic party and the American left. So have the decentralizing patterns of the American economy in the last several decades, and the ongoing decentralization of information and media. The postwar suburbs eventually helped break the New Deal coalition. In 2004, George W. Bush carried nearly every fast-growing exurban county, and the exurbs have helped elect Republican governors in once-rock-solid Democratic Maryland and Massachusetts. Some people have argued that exurbs are red-state incubators, where more housing for less money means larger families and growing political power for a more conservative-minded population.

Though Republicans have capitalized on these trends, their ongoing success is not assured. As Fred Barnes and others have noted, the recent gubernatorial election in Virginia was alarming for the fact that not only did the Republican candidate lose large inner suburbs like Arlington and Fairfax, but he also narrowly lost exurban counties like Prince William and Loudoun, normally solid Republican territory. This should remind us that, while sprawl’s critics overstate their case and betray their own personal and social biases, there are some problems in these areas. Suburban and exurban residents are concerned about traffic, congestion–yes, these areas are getting more dense–and the quality of their schools. Big-city problems like crime and gangs have also begun to affect these neighborhoods. In Virginia, this allowed Democrat Tim Kaine to portray himself as a suburban technocrat eager to fix problems.

When Republicans talk about urban issues, they largely speak of inner cities and poverty. The decade of the 1990s was the decade of cities, as mayors across the country challenged liberal orthodoxies in city government. Republicans and right-leaning think tanks helped lead the way. But in the first decade of the 21st century, Republicans need to relearn the language of the suburbs and exurbs. That’s where the votes are.

While suburban sprawl might not be everyone’s cup of tea, (including mine) sprawl-like communities seem to afford a large number of people the kinds of lives they wish to lead. Sprawl critics have yet to convince large numbers of Americans that their solutions for engineering private choices about how and where to live and work will result in greater social benefits or happiness. Sprawl is messy, chaotic, and sometimes annoying. In short, it is everything one expects from a free and democratic society. Leave the neat and clean societies for totalitarian regimes. Sprawl creates problems, just like every other social trend; but to damn it for its problems is akin to outlawing the sun for causing skin cancer.

Robert Bruegmann reminds us that much of the anti-sprawl crusade is a result of a rising level of prosperity, and the complexity of millions of individual decisions made on a daily basis by millions of citizens. Better to have to deal with long commutes and strained infrastructure than malaria, cholera, or declining life expectancy. In terms of problems, I’d take sprawl any day.

Vincent J. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Martin Zimmerman

Preservation

May 2006

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Not New or Bad?

Taking a different look at urban sprawl

Sprawl: A Compact History

By Robert Bruegmann

The University of Chicago Press, $27.50

What is sprawl? Is it, as renowned city historian Lewis Mumford believed, a monotonous wasteland “inhabited by people of the same class, the same income … witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods?” Or is it a recurring settlement pattern, even a basic human need, as ancient as civilization itself? In this insightful, informative, and rigorously researched book, Robert Bruegmann, a professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, attempts to dispassionately dismember all manner of 20th-century contradictions and dubious assumptions about sprawl and its unrealized remedies—from British new towns to New Urbanism, from anti-highway arguments to allegations that link suburbs to global warming. Sprawl is less a compact history of suburban growth, as the title suggests, and more a biting critique of those who undervalue its holding power and inevitability, although the book contains questionable lapses that raise doubts as to whether it is as objective as it purports to be.

Bruegmann argues that low-density urban dispersal is intrinsic to all cities and dates back to the beginnings of city life. In first-century Rome, the appellation suburbium was used to describe land uses not otherwise accommodated within the capital’s dense walled sectors. Even “exurbia,” that outer zone derided by many as a haven for huge-lot McMansionists, has a lengthy history, as illustrated by a 1740 map of the Paris region showing large aristocratic estates scattered well beyond the city’s outskirts (the largest being Versailles).

Not until the 20th century, however, did the term “sprawl” appear as a pejorative to defend various but similar ideological movements. Despite increasing popularity, these modern antisprawl campaigns, which the author discusses in detail, could not possibly contain a growing middle class intent on living in low-density settings. Nor is this trend limited to the United States. Revealing photos of places as seemingly varied as Bangkok, suburban Paris, or Bangalore, India, portray densities and land patterns akin to Phoenix or Los Angeles.

Granted that many bold government programs have tried to rein in sprawl. But the text suggests, through program-by-program analysis, that these have achieved limited success. For example, Portland, Ore., with its urban growth boundary, sleek light-rail transit, and thriving compact core, is a city closely watched as a countersprawl incubator. Many articles and books have validated Portland’s planning efforts; one research paper, publicized by the National Center for Smart Growth, indicated that by 1990, Portland had turned a corner in outpacing cities that lacked growth management systems—proving that at last “the war on sprawl” was being won. But Bruegmann submits what he considers evidence to the contrary: The rail system carries only two percent of all regional trips, growth controls have pushed some people far beyond the boundaries because they cannot afford pricier real estate, and densities may have increased in accordance with national trends with or without growth boundaries. He does admit, however, that they “have almost certainly kept a great deal of suburban growth out of the countryside around Portland.”

The scorecard of Hamburg, Germany, is comparable to Portland’s, as in much of Europe, contends Bruegmann, where government controls are much more stringent than here. In Hamburg—where laws regulate store sizes, business hours, and numbers of employees to ward off discount chains—the net result is to force prices higher. Residents must live in smaller dwellings because of limited land and rising purchase costs, despite polls showing a preference for the suburban lifestyle. But as Hamburg’s affluence has grown, he states, the public has sought “privacy, mobility and choice,” the three values Bruegmann defines as the basis for present-day urban dispersal. As a consequence, “the system of regulations that protected traditional European centers from competition is under siege.”

Sprawl generally avoids the temptation to foist a prosprawl agenda upon the reader. Yet, to those of us who do support vigorous antisprawl reforms, it is tempting to suspect that the book’s pronounced tilt toward free-market mechanisms and consumer choice is a subtle guise for the sprawl-supporting voices of libertarianism. But nowhere does Bruegmann defend property rights as inalienable, nor does he dismiss government controls outright. In fact, the book’s closing remarks, tracking recent trends to higher densities, illustrate his basic stance, which is simply that people have a right to live where and how they desire—high-rise condo or cul-de-sac. By asking tough questions, postulating rational responses, and trying to separate fact from fiction, Sprawl may be the most intelligent critique of antisprawl reform in print. It is unquestionably a book to be read and debated.

Anthony Flint

Sprawl isn't what it used to be, some experts contend. Is it time we stopped worrying and learned to love the subdivision?

October 2, 2005

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FROM PASCO COUNTY outside Tampa to the ranchland north of Dallas to Phoenix and Las Vegas and Boise, the freshly built subdivision miles from anywhere has become the official choice for millions of Americans. Demographers today use the term ’’exurban” to describe this kind of location, on open land outside the farthest fringes of existing suburban development and completely lacking in any traditional relationship with a major city. Planners, environmentalists, and architects urging more compact growth call it wasteful sprawl.

But despite rising gas prices that make it increasingly expensive to get around these spread-out landscapes, some scholars and commentators have been stepping up to say that sprawl really isn’t so bad.

Some recent developments outside Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas are far-flung but quite dense, for example, suggesting a kind of creeping efficiency in America’s continuing suburbanization. A Brookings Institution study on the Los Angeles area found an average of nine people per acre of newly developed land from 1982 to 1997, three times the rate of the New York metropolitan area. By the measure of people per square mile, Los Angeles–hemmed in, for all its expanse, by mountains and the ocean–is more dense than Chicago, according to the Census Bureau. The lines of single-family homes packed in close together have even prompted some grumbling that this fresh brand of suburbia doesn’t provide enough elbow room.

Density is only one factor in the analysis of dispersed development. Because all the functions of life—homes, stores, entertainment, and work-places—are rigidly separated and spread out, everyone needs a car to get around. That means long commutes, traffic jams, and less quality time with family. Local governments are going broke trying to extend water and sewer lines and other infrastructure to outlying areas, even if it’s dense once you get there. Sprawl eats up farmland and open space, and investment in sprawling areas has tended to be at the expense of inner cities, worsening social and economic fragmentation.

But is all that a bad rap? Maybe, says Robert Bruegmann, a professor of art history, planning and architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who identifies many good things about sprawl. ’‘It’s no better or no worse than any other settlement pattern,” Bruegmann says. ’’It works because it satisfies a lot of needs. When people have been able to afford it, people move out of cities. We now have tens of millions of people who can do what only a small minority once could do.”

Bruegmann, whose new book, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago), will be published this month, joins consultant and author Joel Kotkin, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and others in finding inspiration in the subdivisions, like a Jane Jacobs of suburbia. The embrace of dispersal follows a long tradition started by Thomas Jefferson and followed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Today Bruegmann and others feel it’s important to identify what’s good about spread-out development because sprawl has been hammered for over two decades by activists urging ’’smart growth” and New Urbanism, the latter an architectural movement promoting compact traditional neighborhood design.

Sprawl gives us ’’decentralization and democratization,” Bruegmann says—an orderly use of land that draws in working-class and middle-class people and allows them to head upward in the economy and society. Homes in new subdivisions in the South and West commonly start at $120,000. To try to curb sprawl is to stand in the way of the flourishing of the American dream.

’‘It’s a way to get things once possessed by only a few,” Bruegmann says. ’’Privacy, mobility—social and physical—and choice.”

Nor is sprawl a new phenomenon. From ancient Rome and China to 19th-century London to Paris and Los Angeles today, society has spread out during economic good times. ’‘There’s a massive out-migration as soon as people can afford it,” Bruegmann says. Accordingly, maybe we should all stop worrying and learn to love the subdivision.

Of course, a darker future is seen by others who look at the nation’s spread-out landscape. James Howard Kunstler, a champion of New Urbanism and author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century (2005), argues that when cheap oil is no longer available, the suburban economy will collapse: The physical arrangement requiring long trips to get everywhere will become folly. Kunstler all but predicts tumbleweeds in front of Wal-Marts on long commercial strips.

’’Our cities are generally hypertrophic organisms—they have grown too large over the past century, via the growth medium of cheap energy,” Kunstler says. ’’Whatever else they are now, they are certain to contract in the 21st century. The process will probably involve densification back in the core or around waterfronts, as cities generally contract in overall size.” Our current living arrangement, he says, ’’follows the relentless logic of cancer, hypertrophy, and will prove to be self-limiting as it consumes and destroys its host.”

Most smart-growth activists today don’t spend a lot of time criticizing sprawl or predicting suburbia’s demise. Their main focus is providing more choice for those people who don’t want to live in sprawl—changing outdated zoning that prevents compact, mixed-use development near train stations, for example.

’‘Smart growth doesn’t say all sprawl is awful,” says John Frece, associate director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research at the University of Maryland. ’‘It’s not about taking away the ability to develop sprawl—just to add the ability to do different kinds of development and put that on equal footing. Then let the market decide.”

Bruegmann says he’s quite open to the idea that Americans choose different living arrangements at different times of life. And, just to complicate everyone’s thinking a little further, he also predicts that as societies get ever more affluent, more people want to come back to cities. It’s just a matter of understanding how wealth drives the popularity of different physical landscapes.

’’If you have enough money, living at high density is very alluring,” he says. ’’I think there will always be some people who will want to live in suburban settings no matter what. But if you have a spacious apartment on Fifth Avenue with a doorman, and you can get in a taxi or walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art…millions of people would love to do that.”

Ultimately, says Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History (2005), ‘‘The problems of sprawl have to be solved within the context of sprawl. You’re not going to stop it. You can’t reengineer society by getting everyone to move back to Boston. Forget about it. It’s not happening.”

Sprawl is getting better, Kotkin says—more dense, and eventually featuring a better mix of uses, with stores and workplaces closer to homes. Kotkin predicts more of these kinds of suburban villages, which he calls ’’the new suburbanism,” a deliberate echo of the New Urbanism. With the help of technology, more people will be able to work from home or closer to home. Car trips will still be necessary, but they could be shorter and done using hybrid and energy-efficient vehicles.

‘‘In southern California we’ve been saying this for years: ‘It’s just a different kind of city,”’ Kotkin says. ‘‘It’s like someone from Florence coming to 19th-century Manchester. They’d say, ‘Where’s the church in the middle?’ It’s just different. The urbanization of suburbia is the great challenge of land-use planning in early 21st-century America.”

Anthony Flint is a Globe reporter and author of the forthcoming book This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America, to be published in the spring by Johns Hopkins University Press.

James Robbins

San Diego Union-Journal

October 23, 2005

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You gotta go where you wanna go

A professor defends suburban sprawl – for all the wrong reasons

It’s always fun to poke fun at conventional wisdom, and in his latest book, Robert Bruegmann sings a planner’s version of “Sympathy for the Devil” by advancing a simple theme: Sprawl is good.

Bruegmann, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that sprawl is neither a recent nor an American phenomenon, but rather the natural result of any society characterized by increasing democracy, mobility and economic self-determination. He bashes at the arguments for growth management with all the enthusiasm of a child swinging at a piñata. Eventually, the piñata gets whacked a few times, and the reader is left to enjoy the shiny insights that spill out. The lasting memory, though, is a dizzy author swinging and missing.

To be fair, let’s start with some of Bruegmann’s shiny insights – but to be entirely fair, let’s acknowledge that they aren’t entirely his. There’s never been a shortage of anti-urban proponents. For at least 200 years, intellectuals ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Karl Marx to the visionary French architect Le Corbusier have written about the corrupting influences and social misery of densely populated cities. Village Associations began planning idealized suburbs outside of the London metropolis as early as 1848, and there is a long history of visionary plans focused on low-density suburban living. Among the most famous are Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden Cities of Tomorrow” (1902) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” (1932); Bruegmann mentions Howard only in passing and ignores Wright altogether, perhaps because they don’t fit into his view that growth-management advocates represent a cultural elite eager to impose their aesthetic and cultural values on unwashed commoners.

Bruegmann does argue convincingly that “sprawl has been a persistent feature in cities since the beginning of urban history,” citing the steady drop in the density of cities from 150,000 people per square mile in Mesopotamian times. By way of comparison, he charts the density of a wide range of present-day American urbanized areas, including Los Angeles, our densest urban area, with a population of over 7,000 people per square mile. (Surprise! The Los Angeles metropolitan region is significantly denser than New York and almost twice as dense as Chicago. Who woulda thunk?)

In virtually every city in the world, Bruegmann demonstrates, population growth is rising faster at the edges than at the centers. The suburbanization of Europe lagged behind America in the aftermath of World War II, but rising affluence has changed all that. The growth rate in the ownership of private cars in Europe now parallels our own, despite punitive fuel taxes. Amazingly, by 1999, when the city of Paris had a population of 2.2 million, the Ile de France, the French province whose heart is Paris, had grown to a population of nearly 10 million. Simply put: The city of Paris now accounts for less than 25 percent of all Parisians!

Bruegmann also effectively dispels many of the conventional explanations for suburbanization: white flight, a plot by General Motors to eliminate mass transit, government subsidization of freeways, a tax code that encourages home ownership and mass marketing of the merchant builders who have commoditized housing.

He argues instead that the city’s waning role in societal defense, its increasing affluence and the rise of democratic institutions led inevitably to a mass exodus from crowded, unhealthy and chaotic city centers. Most critics of suburban development ignore the attraction of clean, orderly communities where citizens can band together to privatize maintenance (through homeowners’ associations), security (through private patrol companies) and recreation (through private clubs and parks restricted to homeowners). Most important, suburbs allow new residents to enroll their children in public schools that are adequately funded.

Bruegmann takes the argument to extremes, however, defending the practice of “redlining” – banks’ denying real estate loans simply because of a property’s inner city location – for example, and pointing to Moscow as the only successful paradigm of anti-sprawl planning. He dons a cloak of impartiality, but he recounts the debate over growth management like a ring announcer at a wrestling match: In this corner, representing democracy, choice, affluence and mobility (and sprawl) – Mr. Market; and in the other, representing cultural elitists and centralized communist planning (and growth management) – Big Brother.

Toward the end of his essay, Bruegmann finally gets around to critiquing Portland, Ore., the city with the nation’s most famous growth management program. Portland’s plan emphasizes transit-oriented development and imposes urban growth limits. Even Bruegmann acknowledges the high quality of urban life there, but he struggles to find fault, dwelling on the “perverse consequences of regulation.” He argues that the ordinance has made housing more expensive, created “winners and losers” and actually led to the development of some new exurban communities producing even longer commutes. (Think Temecula.)

A zoning ordinance that made some people richer and some people poorer? A municipal policy that had unintended consequences? We are shocked. Shocked!

Those aren’t reasons to stop planning; they’re reasons to do it carefully, and to go on amending the plan, as if our future depended upon it. Bruegmann never really confronts the unmeasured cost of not protecting our inherited natural and cultural resources for future generations. When he suggests that the direction of cities is best left to unbridled market forces, his tone is shrill – which is odd, since he’s on the side that’s winning.

We can build settlements on major earthquake faults, we can build them in floodplains, we can make cities ever more dependent on imported fossil fuels, and we can even build them below sea level in Hurricane Alley – and we have and we do, for short-term economic reasons. Mother Nature has a way of evening the score, however, as Katrina has so powerfully reminded us.

Bruegmann’s thesis that growth management is the undemocratic ideal of cultural elitists remains unconvincing. It was the populist preacher Robert Schuller, after all, not some Stalinist apparatchik, who said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Bruegmann also fails in his presentation of urban planning as an exercise in futility. He is surely correct that we can never eliminate sprawl from the American landscape, but his book will not extinguish the dream of an affluent, democratic society that offers its citizens more choices, not fewer, and a future that passes on to our children the natural and cultural resources we inherited from our parents.

James Robbins is a principal at Robbins Jorgensen Christopher, a multidisciplinary design firm with offices in San Diego and Newport Beach.

Witold Rybczynski

Slate

Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 6:42 PM ET

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‍Suburban Despair

Is urban sprawl really an American menace?

We hate sprawl. It’s responsible for everything that we don’t like about modern American life: strip malls, McMansions, big-box stores, the loss of favorite countryside, the decline of downtowns, traffic congestion, SUVs, high gas consumption, dependence on foreign oil, the Iraq war. No doubt about it, sprawl is bad, American bad. Like expanding waistlines, it’s touted around the world as yet another symptom of our profligacy and wastefulness as a nation. Or, as Robert Bruegmann puts it in his new book, “cities that sprawl and, by implication, the citizens living in them, are self indulgent and undisciplined.”

Or not. In Sprawl, cheekily subtitled “A Compact History,” Bruegmann, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the assumptions that underpin most people’s strongly held convictions about sprawl. His conclusions are unexpected. To begin with, he finds that urban sprawl is not a recent phenomenon: It has been a feature of city life since the earliest times. The urban rich have always sought the pleasures of living in low-density residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities. As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. Pliny’s maritime villa was 17 miles from the city, and many fashionable Roman villa districts such as Tusculum—where Cicero had a summer house—were much closer. Bruegmann also observes that medieval suburbs—those urbanized areas outside cities’ protective walls—had a variety of uses. Manufacturing processes that were too dirty to be located inside the city (such as brick kilns, tanneries, slaughterhouses) were in the suburbs; so were the homes of those who could not afford to reside within the city proper. This pattern continued during the Renaissance. Those compact little cities bounded by bucolic landscapes, portrayed in innumerable idealized paintings, were surrounded by extensive suburbs.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sprawl” first appeared in print in this context in 1955, in an article in the London Times that contained a disapproving reference to “great sprawl” at the city’s periphery. But, as Bruegmann shows, by then London had been spreading into the surrounding countryside for hundreds of years. During the 17th and 18th centuries, while the poor moved increasingly eastward, affluent Londoners built suburban estates in the westerly direction of Westminster and Whitehall, commuting to town by carriage. These areas are today the Central West End; one generation’s suburb is the next generation’s urban neighborhood. As Bruegmann notes, “Clearly, from the beginning of modern urban history, and contrary to much accepted wisdom, suburban development was very diverse and catered to all kinds of people and activities.”

When inexpensive public transportation opened up South London for development in the 19th century, London sprawl took a different form: streets and streets of small brick-terrace houses. For middle-class families, this dispersal was a godsend, since it allowed them to exchange a cramped flat for a house with a garden. The outward movement continued in the boom years between the First and Second World Wars, causing the built-up area of London to double, although the population increased by only about 10 percent—which sounds a lot like Atlanta today.

It was not only by sprawling at the edges that cities reduced their densities. Preindustrial cities began life by exhibiting what planners call a steep “density gradient,” that is, the population density was extremely high in the center and dropped off rapidly at the edges. Over time, with growing prosperity—and the availability of increasingly far-reaching mass transportation (omnibuses, streetcars, trains, subways, cars)—this gradient flattened out. Density at the center reduced while density in the (expanding) suburbs increased. The single most important variable in this common pattern was, as Bruegmann observes, not geography or culture, but the point at which the city reached economic maturity. In the case of London, the city’s population density peaked in the early 19th century; in Paris it happened in the 1850s; and in New York City in the early 1900s. While the common perception is that sprawl is America’s contribution to urban culture, Bruegmann shows that it appeared in Europe first.

Yet haven’t high rates of automobile ownership, easy availability of land, and a lack of central planning made sprawl much worse in the United States? Most American tourists spend their time visiting historic city centers, so they may be unaware that suburbs now constitute the bulk of European metropolitan areas, just as they do in America. We marvel at the efficiency of European mass transit, but since 1950, transit ridership has remained flat, while the use of private automobiles has skyrocketed. Just as in America. “As cities across Europe have become more affluent in the last decades of the twentieth century,” Bruegmann writes, “they have witnessed a continuing decline in population densities in the historic core, a quickening of the pace of suburban and exurban development, a sharp rise in automobile ownership and use, and the proliferation of subdivisions of single-family houses and suburban shopping centers.”

Despite some of the most stringent anti-sprawl regulations in the world and high gas prices, the population of the City of Paris has declined by almost a third since 1921, while its suburbs have grown. Over the last 15 years, the city of Milan has lost about 600,000 people to its metropolitan fringes, while Barcelona, considered by many a model compact city, has developed extensive suburbs and has experienced the largest population loss of any European city in the last 25 years. Greater London, too, continues to sprawl, resulting in a population density of 12,000 persons per square mile, about half that of New York City.

The point is not that London, any more than Barcelona or Paris, is a city in decline (although the demographics of European city centers have changed and are now home to wealthier and older inhabitants, just like some American cities). Central urban densities are dropping because household sizes are smaller and affluent people occupy more space. Like Americans, Europeans have opted for decentralization. To a great extent, this dispersal is driven by a desire for home-ownership. “Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans, like most Americans, and indeed most people worldwide, would prefer to live in single-family houses on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings,” Bruegmann writes. So strong is this preference that certain European countries such as Ireland and the United Kingdom now have higher single-family house occupancy rates than the United States, while others, such as Holland, Belgium, and Norway, are comparable. Half of all French households now live in houses.

It appears that all cities—at least all cities in the industrialized Western world—have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal. Why is this significant? “Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax,” Bruegmann writes. “It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy.”

What this iconoclastic little book demonstrates is that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities. Nor is it an aberration. Bruegmann shows that asking whether sprawl is “good” or “bad” is the wrong question. Sprawl is and always has been inherent to urbanization. It is driven less by the regulations of legislators, the actions of developers, and the theories of city planners, than by the decisions of millions of individuals—Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” This makes altering it very complicated, indeed. There are scores of books offering “solutions” to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book. To find solutions—or, rather, better ways to manage sprawl, which is not the same thing—it helps to get the problem right.

Witold Rybczynski is Slate’s architecture critic.

Whitney Gould

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Posted: Nov. 14, 2005

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Author says suburban sprawl isn’t new, and isn’t all bad

Its critics view suburban sprawl as wasteful, ugly and soul-sapping. Architectural historian Robert Bruegmann sees it as part of an ancient yearning for space and freedom. In a provocative new book, “Sprawl: A Compact History” (University of Chicago Press; $27.50), he traces sprawl to the beginnings of urban settlement and argues that it offers the benefits of privacy, physical and social mobility and personal choice. Bruegmann, 57, grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb and teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he is chairman of the Department of Art History. He talked about his contrarian perspective with urban landscape writer Whitney Gould.

Q. You make sprawl seem perfectly natural. But haven’t federal highway policies, home-mortgage subsidies and zoning regulations played an important role in scattering development?

A. Virtually every cause you can think of you can actually make into an effect. For example, you can say the rise of auto ownership caused sprawl. But we might never have had a major auto industry if people didn’t want to live in lower-density environments. The mortgage-interest deduction did play a role. But it did not become a potent mechanism until the 1960s. The period of the 1880s to 1950 experienced the greatest dispersal. And, contrary to popular belief, the decentralization of cities is not actually increasing. It has been declining steadily since the 1950s.

Q. There are all sorts of studies documenting the costs of sprawl: lost farmland and open space, money and energy spent on commuting, social and racial isolation, the tax burden of new services like roads, schools and sewers. How can you ignore all that?

A. Many of those studies have been almost entirely discredited. For example, does it really make more economic sense to restore an old loft in the center of the city than to build six new units outside the city? It may cost less initially, but more over the life cycle of a building. Also, sewers and roads are really cheap compared to the personnel costs of running city governments. And who pays the costs of (new) services? Mostly it’s the people buying suburban property, in the form of exactions and fees passed on by developers.

Q. You seem to leave poor people out of the equation. They can’t live in the sprawl zone because there is little if any affordable housing out there, and they may not have cars or adequate public transit to commute out to jobs there, either. What about their needs?

A. Most poor people in America live in single-family homes and they have cars. Los Angeles is a good example. But as more jobs are created on the edges of cities, one answer might be to give every (poor person) a car and make it easier to get out of the city. Government attempts to create affordable housing have not been very successful.

Q. One of the less tangible effects of sprawl is the loss of a sense a place. Do we really want an entire landscape filled with anonymous big-box stores and cookie-cutter homes?

A. What offends you may not offend most people. People made the same criticism about brick row houses on the periphery of 19th-century London; they said the same thing about (American) ranch houses. Some day the buildings in our suburbs may be considered “historic.” They might even be candidates for landmark designation!

Q. Do you live in the suburbs?

A. No. I live in a high-rise apartment on the north side of Chicago. I can’t imagine living in the suburbs. But the last thing I want to do is impose my own choices on everyone else.

Thomas J. Sugrue

The Nation

Review: posted February 9, 2006 (February 27, 2006 issue)

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The Geography of Fear

Deerfield, Illinois, is little different in appearance from most postwar American suburbs. If a resident of Troy, Michigan, or Alpharetta, Georgia, were to find herself in Deerfield today, the place would feel familiar. A community of mostly single-family detached houses on large, well-landscaped lots along curvilinear streets, Deerfield was a small village on Chicago’s periphery in 1950. Its strongest selling point–then and now–is that it was not the city. Like most of Chicago’s satellites, it is overwhelmingly white. It is a prosperous community with relatively low taxes and excellent public schools and services. Its location offers economic advantages to area residents. It is convenient to the suburban office parks and malls where the lion’s share of metropolitan Chicago’s new jobs have been created. Deerfield is part of an increasingly self-contained galaxy of suburbs and exurbs that extends largely unbroken for nearly fifty miles north and west of the city. What remains of the prairie and farmland that once began in Deerfield’s backyard is now cordoned off in scattered parks and the occasional undeveloped lot. Most Deerfielders don’t even commute to Chicago; they are more likely to be day-trippers than workers in the Windy City.

Almost from the day the first kidney-shaped cul-de-sac was cut into the prairie soil, these metropolitan landscapes have been the subject of intense political debate. In 1961, looking out onto the Deerfields and Levittowns and Park Forests and Lakewoods that had sprung up virtually overnight on the periphery of nearly every major American city, the great urbanist Lewis Mumford lamented the “multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.” Our debate about suburbanization has largely been about mass culture and taste, isolation and conformity.

Latter-day suburban critics like the acerbic James Howard Kunstler (The Geography of Nowhere) paint a dark picture of a pathological culture of hyper-consumerism that has crushed the small-town Gemeinschaft that once supposedly characterized the United States. In contrast, defenders of suburbia and exurbia, like David Brooks, seek to rescue suburbanites, their SUVs and their mega-grills from the condescension of urban, latte-sipping, blue-staters.

Kunstler and Brooks would be interesting footnotes to the culture wars of the past two decades were it not for a large, well-funded, disciplined movement that has risen up to challenge suburban sprawl. Over the past decade a growing chorus of activists–a motley crew of wealthy suburbanites, urban community development activists, horse farmers, environmentalists, architects and critics–have denounced the mega shopping malls and big-box retailers that drain business from city centers; “McMansions” and vast seas of asphalt that have gobbled up wetlands and family farms; and the gas-addicted soccer moms and office-park dads who clog the roads. While many of these critics have a hard time concealing their disdain for bent-grass lawns and two-story foyers and three-car garages, their argument with suburbia is not primarily cultural. Instead, they contend that sprawl fragments government, maldistributes economic resources and ravages the environment. Armed with studies from the Brookings Institution, the Wharton School and even the US Geological Survey, they advocate “smart growth”–public policies that encourage public transportation, preserve environmentally fragile land and channel investment to older, denser urban centers.

A few dissident activists and intellectuals, mostly libertarian think-tankers and developer-sponsored lobbyists, have tried to defend unregulated, low-density suburban growth. Joining them is architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, whose Sprawl: A Compact History provides the most coherent and well-informed defense of sprawl to date. Bruegmann weaves an encyclopedic knowledge of urban planning history into a scathing polemic, lending his book an authority that is lacking in the pro-suburban tracts of writers like David Brooks, and an incisive political edge atypical of academic studies.

Peering out of airplane windows or walking along downtown city streets, Bruegmann is a natural flâneur who guides his readers through modern metropolises as diverse as Stockholm, Hamburg, Los Angeles, Portland, Houston and Chicago, with historical detours to ancient Rome, early modern Paris, and nineteenth-century London. Some of his findings are eye-opening. European cities, long appreciated for their urbanity and walkability, are rapidly suburbanizing (only a quarter of Parisians today actually live in central Paris). By contrast, in the past thirty years many American metropolitan areas have grown denser, even as they continue to decentralize. A quarter of the new housing starts in metropolitan Chicago are attached houses. Los Angeles–the epitome of sprawl–is now the densest urbanized area in the United States, with more than 7,000 people per square mile. In the prosperous countries of Europe and North America, at least, sprawl is the norm.

For Bruegmann, this is all to the good. In a libertarian mantra that he repeats throughout the book, sprawl is the outgrowth of the ostensibly universal human quest for “privacy, mobility, and choice.” After all, the ancient Romans built suburban villas in the hills of Tivoli and Frascati; bourgeois nineteenth-century Londoners fled to the Surrey countryside; and early twentieth-century New Yorkers overflowed into Brooklyn, Queens and beyond. Sprawl accelerated in the twentieth century, Bruegmann argues, because democracy and affluence allowed ordinary citizens to follow in the suburbanizing footsteps of the wealthy. Our galactic, decentralized metropolises are the result of “millions of individual choices.” To curb sprawl would be to snuff out democracy, limit personal choice and ultimately undo the greatest triumphs of modern life.

A market populist, Bruegmann spares no invective in challenging sprawl’s critics as a “small cultural elite” blinded by “aesthetic prejudices” and “obvious class bias.” Out of touch with middle America, sprawl’s critics would, if they had their way, replace suburbia with “an idealized vision of the European city of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Bruegmann singles out environmentalists for particular scorn, as heirs of “the hoary tradition of wanting to reform the lives of other people, particularly people who couldn’t be trusted to make the right decisions on their own.” To those who make “highly subjective” arguments against increased automobile use, dependency on fossil fuel, longer commuting times and the loss of farmland, wetlands and forests, Bruegmann offers a whiggish rejoinder. Why complain? Environmental problems were worse fifty or 100 years ago–and the same affluence that has spurred sprawl has led to a cleaner environment. (What Bruegmann won’t acknowledge is that those meddling reformers he vilifies were largely responsible for sanitary and environmental regulations.) True, suburbs and exurbs today are not afflicted by the pall of coal soot that once darkened the skies of Pittsburgh or Cleveland or New York. Lawn fertilizer and automobile fluids running into creeks is nothing compared with the open sewers that ran through American city streets throughout most of the nineteenth century. But the “it used to be worse” comparison leads Bruegmann to dismiss mounting evidence of the long-term cumulative effects of suburban sprawl on global warming and species loss. Even relatively short increases in automobile travel time because of sprawl–when aggregated by the millions–mean more fuel burned and more air and water pollution. Alone, controls on suburban growth and better transportation planning won’t solve the problem of global warming. But car dependency surely makes it worse.

Bruegmann’s idealized portrait of suburban growth as an expression of democracy and choice obscures the most important criticism of sprawl, namely that it causes and perpetuates economic and racial inequalities. The rapid expansion of suburbia and exurbia has been fueled by the large-scale exodus of whites from central cities and, increasingly, from racially and ethnically diverse older suburbs. Racial inequality is not the only cause of sprawl. But it takes a peculiarly narrow vision of urban history to claim that it isn’t crucial. The result has been the growing concentration of poor people of color in central cities; the growth of entry-level jobs in places that are increasingly distant from poor neighborhoods; increased racial segregation in education; and, most important, because of the fragmentation of most metropolitan governments, a lack of political will to grapple with “urban” problems, like concentrated poverty, inferior schools and disinvestment. Sprawl is the geography of inequality.

What is most characteristic about sprawling suburbs today is how they rely on both public and private regulations to circumvent choice. In his deeply researched and well-written book Bourgeois Nightmares, MIT historian Robert Fogelson shows that American suburbs have assumed their sprawling form precisely because developers wanted to curb individual choice. In this dark genealogy of suburbia, Fogelson persuasively demonstrates that fear–not future-looking optimism–shaped the geography of metropolitan America. Through the mid-nineteenth century, wealthy and working-class people lived cheek by jowl in American cities. But by century’s end, middle-class and wealthy Americans grew increasingly fearful of their neighbors, especially immigrants and blacks. And they also grew fundamentally distrustful of one another. In America’s freewheeling capitalist society, property owners inevitably sought the “highest,” or most profitable, use for their property, regardless of its impact on their neighbors. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, developers began to impose “restrictive covenants” that controlled how a property could be developed, how it could be used and who could live there. By the 1920s, restrictions had become ubiquitous; by the 1930s, they were written into zoning laws; and they remain in full force throughout much of sprawl-land today.

The form that metropolitan areas took was not the result of the agglomeration of millions of individual choices: Rather, those choices were structured by a series of increasingly rigid regulations. Most important in shaping the social geography and the environment of suburbs were regulations that specified lot size and forbade multiple-family dwellings, and by so doing priced out poor and working-class purchasers.

The detached suburban house, set back from the street and surrounded by large green yards, was not solely or primarily an expression of a cultural preference for green, open space. It was a device to exclude “undesirables” whose very presence threatened upwardly mobile suburbanites. Other restrictions further blocked access by low-income residents. In the early twentieth century, when most working-class people kept chickens and pigs as a matter of survival, suburban developers put restrictions on household animals, not just to keep out squealing pigs but their owners, too.

The most pernicious tactic that determined the patterns of suburbanization were racial and ethnic restrictions. Beginning in the 1920s, it was commonplace for developers to restrict the use or ownership of houses to “the Caucasian race.” Even after the Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling that restrictive covenants were unenforceable, prohibitions against “Africans, Negroes, and Ethiopians” (and sometimes Jews and Asians) remained in deeds and continued to shape real estate practices. Until the 1960s it was “unethical” for realtors to introduce “undesirable” groups into a neighborhood. Racial restrictions also shaped federal mortgage lending policies that forbade loans to racially mixed neighborhoods. Most important, they shaped the still-widespread belief that the presence of more than a few blacks in a neighborhood is irrefutable evidence of decline.

The exclusion of these “undesirables” has a long and sordid history, which James Loewen chronicles with zeal in Sundown Towns. Through oral histories, research in local libraries and the use of census data, Loewen has uncovered thousands of little-known “sundown towns,” places throughout the United States that systematically excluded African-Americans. Loewen found evidence that at least 184 towns marked their borders with signs like one in Hawthorne, California, that read “Nigger Don’t Let the Sun Set on YOU in Hawthorne.” Loewen estimates that at least 3,000 towns “went sundown,” most during the period between 1890 and 1968. Many of these towns had a small number of blacks in the 1880s or ‘90s but were all-white by 1930. A majority of sundown towns were in the North and West (Illinois alone had at least 456). Blacks knew well to avoid such places–and if they didn’t, whites had all sorts of ways, from police harassment to mob violence, to remind them that they were not welcome. The singular contribution of Loewen’s book is to show that white Northerners were every bit as effective in enforcing segregation as the Southern architects of Jim Crow.

Loewen hopes to jar white readers from their sense of racial innocence by uncovering a painful, neglected history of systematic racial exclusion. Most white Americans take for granted the homogeneity of their neighborhoods. Loewen offers the powerful rejoinder that the segregation of blacks and whites (and to a lesser extent other minority groups) was no accident. To make his case, he has compiled countless examples of racial incidents in small towns throughout the country. His approach is not graceful: He piles example upon example, overwhelming readers with grim accounts of racial violence, including riots, lynchings and what could be best described as pogroms against blacks, particularly during racially charged strikes or after black-on-white crimes. Especially forceful are his stories of the everyday harassment of Northern blacks by hotel and gas station owners, police officers, real estate agents–all of whom worked to keep towns all-white. While his chronicle of racial incidents can be numbing and repetitious, the cumulative impact is undeniable.

Loewen made his reputation by skewering inaccuracies in history textbooks–and here he accurately blames local historians for covering up the sordid racist histories of their own towns. Still, those who are skeptical of Loewen’s argument will find plenty of gaps in his research. His findings are often speculative (which, to his credit, Loewen candidly admits). Some of his most provocative assertions rest on tiny shards of evidence; in particular, he relies on oral histories and e-mails from residents of sundown towns, making it difficult to differentiate rumor from fact. In his most dubious historical argument–one that goes against the grain of the last generation of African-American historians, who have emphasized black agency–Loewen argues that the great migration of blacks to major Northern cities was “driven by white opposition.” While it is incontestable that some black migrants were refugees from racial violence, they had many good economic and cultural reasons to move to places like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York. Moreover, by focusing so relentlessly on anti-black sentiment, he overlooks the fact that grassroots black activists–even during the early twentieth-century “nadir” of race relations–protested, litigated and resisted segregation throughout the North, even in sundown towns.

Some of Loewen’s most compelling chapters explore “sundown suburbs.” In an era of color-blind rhetoric, most whites explain away their lack of black neighbors as a matter of choice (they would rather live with their own kind) or income (they can’t afford to live in suburbia). Loewen gives the lie to these arguments. He shows that by overwhelming majorities, blacks prefer racially mixed neighborhoods, almost all of them can afford housing in suburban areas and when they have gotten the chance they have often moved there. But in nearly every predominantly white suburb that has attracted more than a token number of blacks, the newcomers have been nearly universally greeted with white flight from neighborhoods and, especially, public schools.

Suburbs systematically excluded blacks using blunt tools. Orville Hubbard, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan (the corporate headquarters of Ford Motor Company), from 1942 to 1978, successfully pledged to keep his city all-white, even though it was bounded by increasingly black sections of Detroit. The nearby Grosse Pointes, among Detroit’s most exclusive suburbs, relied until 1960 on a rating system that measured, among other things, the “swarthiness” of a potential home purchaser. Red-lining prevented blacks from getting mortgages, and real estate agents steered blacks to black neighborhoods, regardless of their preferences. Other suburbs justifiably earned a reputation for racial hostility that deterred many blacks from even considering living there. Deerfield, the exemplar of postwar sprawl on Chicago’s North Shore, followed exactly this route. Its developers took advantage of federally guaranteed mortgages. Its town government carefully crafted zoning laws that kept all but middle-class and wealthy home buyers out. And in 1959, when the Progress Development Corporation began construction on two small subdivisions of single-family detached houses that met Deerfield’s zoning regulations, all hell broke loose. Local residents discovered that Progress planned a model racially integrated community. One of the town’s residents, a partner in a leading Chicago law firm, worked to stop the development by any means necessary. The few Deerfielders who spoke on behalf of the development were heckled; one young lawyer lost his job for taking the “wrong” side in the debate. In a hastily called village referendum, held the weekend before Christmas, town voters overwhelmingly approved a plan to condemn the Progress subdivisions in favor of parkland, even though they had decisively rejected similar plans just a year earlier. Deerfield went sundown. In 2000 its population was just 0.3 percent black.

To a great extent in modern America, where you live determines your economic, educational and political opportunities. But where you live, especially if you are black or working-class or poor, is a matter of constraint as much as choice. Exclusion by class and especially by race has–more than anything else–given modern American metropolitan areas their shape and their distinctive character. From a plane America’s metropolitan landscapes seem sprawling and amorphous and incomprehensible, but on the ground the patterns of race and class and inequality and exclusion are visible to all but the most obtuse. Take a stroll down any side street in Deerfield–as long as you leave by dusk–and then make your way to Chicago’s West Side. Only fifteen or twenty miles separate the two places, but they are worlds apart.

Ken Worpole

The Times Higher Education Supplement

September 1, 2006

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Like Richard Sennett’s recent critical work on American culture, The Corrosion of Character, Robert Bruegmann’s history of suburbanisation starts with a moment of revelation in an aeroplane above New York. Yet where a chance encounter causes Sennett to dwell on the damage done to the contemporary American psyche by the erosion of traditional working cultures and responsibilities, Bruegmann looks down upon the sprawling New Jersey subdivisions and freeways and thinks of the sheer creativity and populist energy of the American Dream, still unfolding.

Bruegmann’s Sprawl has the narrative drive of a polemic, taking issue with one of the great environmental issues of today: how to reconcile the burgeoning demand for detached modern family homes in greenfield settings with limits on the use of land, energy resources and the loss of traditional urban cultures and identities. In short, will there ever be an end to global suburbanisation; and does this matter?

In the 20th century, the suburbs had a bad press. Bruegmann compensates with a book that will be uncomfortable to read for many but is elegantly written and fair to nearly all points of view. Anybody interested in the future of planning policy will have to read it. The book’s principal argument is that housing policy across the world has been shaped by elite interests to protect the exclusive right of a privileged minority to live in leafy settings away from crowded and ageing cities. To this end, all manner of ostensibly high-minded policy objectives have been employed to disguise a basic ressentiment against the lower classes enjoying their own version of the good life away from the city. Furthermore, café-society intellectuals have aided this conspiracy by insisting that high-density living is the only true path to a genuine modern urbanity.

Bruegmann is an admirer of the sceptical environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg and a fellow traveller with those who think that the private motor car has been the greatest boon to personal liberty in the modern world.

Sprawl deals mostly with housing growth in 20th-century America. There are occasional references to Europe, and here some important differences are overlooked, notably in attitudes to the provision of social housing, car dependency and big-box suburban retailing. The wider geopolitical externalities of America’s embrace of car-based suburban living are mentioned only briefly, particularly the historic embroilment in Middle Eastern oil politics and the growing trade deficit with China as a result of Wal-Mart’s hegemony over great swaths of US retailing.

The author’s optimism that human ingenuity and technological sophistication will solve every new problem is bracing, although even he acknowledges that the saturation point for car ownership in the US, at 650 vehicles per 1,000 population, has been almost reached. Other potential endgames implicit in the continuation of sprawl—ultimate limits to the proliferation of second homes, the growth of air traffic and the amount of material consumption and waste disposal—are not considered.

Sprawl is a tribute to American exceptionalism. Many living in smaller, more densely populated countries may balk at the assault on planning regulation conducted here. Many will be grateful to Bruegmann, however, for setting out the troubled history of 20th-century suburbanisation in such a provocative manner and for arguing for a new rapprochement between town and country forms of settlement and lifestyles.

Ken Worpole is an environmental writer whose most recent book is Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West.

LOAD-DATE: September 2, 2006

James Krohe Jr.

Illinois Issues

September 2006

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Everyone thinks they know what it is. Yet a new and readable assessment of sprawl would seem to be welcome among its critics

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The Pretenders’ Chris Hynde, rock’n’roll’s Jane Jacobs, put the case against sprawl in her 1983 lament, My City Was Gone.

My pretty countryside had been paved down the middle by a government that had no pride. The farms of Ohio had been replaced by shopping malls and Muzak filled the air from Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls.

Songwriters with guitars are not our only thinkers to damn urban sprawl. Academics, efficient-government reformers, architects and environmentalists have been singing along with Hynde, so to speak, since the 1950s. Sprawl is the subject of helpful conferences, earnest policy papers and sputtering polemics, and it even briefly appeared as a theme in a presidential campaign. All agree it is bad, yet no one agrees exactly what to do about it.

A new and readable assessment of the phenomenon would seem to be welcome among such critics. Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History is not, however, that book. The author — a widely published professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago — insists that nearly everything we’ve heard about urban sprawl is wrong.

Sprawl, as everyone thinks they know, is the postwar blight wreaked by dispersed, auto-dependent development on the urbanizing fringe of our cities. The result is a landscape widely condemned as peripheral in every way, a maze of lookalike subdivisions and tacky malls, a numbing not-quite-city filled with endless pavement and bored kids. While usually reckoned a phenomenon of the suburbs, sprawl is reshaping all Illinois cities that have room to expand within their municipal boundaries, creating new cities-within-the-city that, while “urban” in a legal sense, are suburban in form and function.

These are not only new cities, but bad ones. Sprawl is polluting the air and has left the nation dangerously dependent on foreign oil. Sprawl accounts for the nation’s shrinking farmland base and its expanding midriff. Depending on whom you read, these unhappy trends are the results of some mix of a federal conspiracy against cities, a socially pernicious impulse among middle-class whites to flee the city and its problems, or a conscienceless capitalism run amok.

Bruegmann insists that this brief is mostly uninformed or dishonest. He offers as a rejoinder a history of sprawl around the world, brief histories of anti-sprawl activism in three recent eras and a summary of the principal measures so far taken by governments in Europe and the United States to contain it. The lessons of this rather miscellaneous survey confound the popular understanding of the issue on nearly every point. Sprawl is indeed a postwar phenomenon — post-Civil War. Look at what happened in Chicago. Illinois’ Ur city has been sprawling since after the Civil War. Ann Durkin Keating, in her book Chicagoland, reports that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, no fewer than 233 settlements were found in the collar counties. (Many of these settlements are now Chicago neighborhoods that have been stripped of suburban status by annexation.) Bruegmann notes there is nothing new in “edge cities,” either, save the fact that they are now being built in suburbs. Places like Schaumburg are merely the most recent version of the business centers that once lay inside municipal borders, such as the area around Halsted and 63rd in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, which in the 1920s was second only to the Loop in the conduct of retail business.

Sprawl in big U.S. cities not only predates the automobile, it predates the United States. Hardly a product of postwar automobile culture, sprawl goes back at least as far as the Romans (from whom we borrowed the term suburb, or suburbium). Far from a peculiarly American disease, sprawl in its familiar form is a disease we caught from the Brits, who invented the modern suburb in the 17th and 18th centuries.

As for another recurring theme in much recent anti-sprawl writing — that suburbs foster a sense of alienation or decline in civic engagement — Bruegmann reminds readers that it was only 50 years ago that sociologists were describing how it was the central cities that were causing alienation and suburbs that were turning their residents into compulsive joiners and volunteers. And far from a product of the private automobile, peripheral residential development on a mass scale was a product of mass transit. The nickel streetcar ride allowed the lower-middle-class out to the then-periphery of our cities, where land was cheap enough that a new house was within reach financially as well as physically. And if we want to see mile after mile of cookie-cutter houses, we shouldn’t look on today’s suburbanizing fringe but in the bungalow belt, most of which was built on former farm fields when hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans began to move in the 1920s.

If sprawl is not new, neither are attempts to rein it in. Bruegmann notes, accurately, that critics of sprawl are mainly people from the upper-middle-class, including what Bruegmann calls “an elite group of academics, central-city business leaders, and employees of not-for-profit organizations.” (One is obliged to note that the critics of the sprawl critics, including Bruegmann, also come from this elite stratum.)

’Twas always thus. Nearly a century ago, Progressive-Era reformers from that same group organized into bodies such as Chicago’s Citizens’ Committee of One Hundred to argue for an end to Illinois’ overlapping local governments on grounds of efficiency. Today’s anti-sprawlers have added a further reason for regionalizing some government functions — cooling the competition for taxable projects that creates a buyer’s market for developers — but the larger dynamic is little changed.

Cities — growing, prosperous cities anyway — make sprawl necessary by rendering the city center crowded, dirty, dangerous and expensive. They also make sprawl possible by generating the wealth people need to escape it. Bruegmann’s ultimate point is that the desire for more privacy, more space and the social comfort of dwelling among people of one’s own class — whatever their color or creed — seems universal, with the result that dispersal to the urban fringe happens whenever and wherever people have enough money and enough freedom to move. In short, given a certain level of wealth and a free market in land, sprawl is inevitable and universal.

Photograph by Lynn Betts, courtesy of the Natural Resources Conservation Service

The social problems caused by subdivision life are hardly on par with those that fester in slums or the worst of our public housing projects.Yet “sprawl” is used almost universally as a pejorative, applied with as much malice, and as little accuracy, as the word “slum” when used to denote any poor neighborhoods.

“Although sprawl has developed differently at different times and in different places,” Bruegmann writes, “the history of sprawl suggests that the two factors that seem to track most closely with sprawl have been increasing affluence and political democratization.” That is not to say that automobile suburbs are to everyone’s taste. They are often damned as ugly, for example although this may be a carelessly chosen word. (The public realm of such places is jumbled, certainly, even incoherent, and certainly banal, but in ugliness even the meanest retail strip scarcely compares with their equivalents across the city line in Chicago.) We don’t really know how to design for the low-density city. Its characteristic elements, such as wide setbacks from the street, are intended to create an ambiance that is not urban. The problem is, such environments are not much of anything else either.

Happily, to some extent, sprawl and such related ills as road congestion sow the seeds of their own reform. Consider transportation. Commuting times in the United States did not increase much between 1960 and 1990, a period when sprawl was sprawliest, because the decentralization of residences was accompanied by a decentralization of jobs. Development spurs rises in land costs, with the result that the number of dwelling units per acre has been going up; sprawl is becoming less sprawly, as much of the new housing in many suburbs is in the form of multi-unit projects such as rowhouses. A city that requires a three-bus commute to a minimum-wage job is not a city that works, in the opinion of the dishwasher who cleans the plates after every anti-sprawl conference.

But the CTA’s L lines are being extended — slowly, yes — into suburban job centers like Schaumburg. Even middle-class workers with nice cars who find the daily commute unpleasant and time-consuming are buying housing clustered nearer their jobs. This has transformed both the old working-class parts of Chicago just outside the Loop into dormitories for the upscale and generated city-style condo and rowhouse and flats-above-the-shops developments near transit stops in the suburbs. Which is exactly what happened in Chicago a century ago, of course; just as the city went from farmhouses to weekend places to bungalows to four-flats to condo towers, so the suburbs are going from single-family ranches to townhouses to, well, condo towers.

Sprawly places are preferred by certain kinds of people for living certain kinds of lives — just as city neighborhoods are, come to think of it. The social problems caused by subdivision life are hardly on a par with those that fester in slums or the worst of our public housing projects. Yet “sprawl” is used almost universally as a pejorative, applied with as much malice, and as little accuracy, as the word “slum” when used to denote any poor neighborhoods. The fevered nature of the complaints about sprawl is reflected in the titles of such recent jeremiads as Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health And Money; The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape; and Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930.

Bruegmann traces this animus to social class. “Wherever and whenever a new class of people has been able to gain some of the privileges once exclusively enjoyed by an entrenched group,” he writes, “the chorus of complaints has suddenly swelled.” Not surprisingly, this has happened during every period of major prosperity because during these times a greater number of families have enjoyed a greater choice of living arrangements. Predictably, every time this has occurred, in the judgment of certain already well-established groups, the newcomers have made the “wrong” choices. Also predictably, criticism of sprawl has virtually always been aimed at people outside the speaker’s or writer’s own circle.

“Sprawl is where other people live,” asserts Bruegmann, speaking more frankly for his critics than they usually do, “particularly people with less taste and good sense than themselves.” This is unkind to sprawl’s many critics, but not especially unfair. As Bruegmann makes plain, most of the arguments against sprawl from social and environmental perspectives are little more than rationalizations of what is, in essence, a cultural judgment.

Viewed thus, the countryside is one more thing — television, higher education and politics are among the many others — that have been ruined by the participation of the larger public. Its customs, its tastes in clothes and architecture, most of all its casual indifference to the city, offends the cultivated urbanite. Contempt for the subdivision/mall lifestyle runs through most anti-sprawl writing, and is expressed in language strikingly reminiscent of that used by previous generations to sneer at the small town or the Old Country.

Class bias is not the only impulse behind the reflexive rejection of low-density development. As noted, sprawl is nearly universally blamed on the post-World War II prosperity and its evils, such as expressways and general automobile ownership. This analysis certainly isn’t buttressed by history; as Bruegmann notes, “Postwar suburbanization and sprawl were different in scale but not really different in kind from what had gone before … in American cities for more than a century, particularly in the boom periods of the 1880s and 1920s.” In Mayer and Wade’s Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis is a photograph of the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s far West Side — new houses here and there in a landscape festooned with scrawny trees and new streets as yet uncluttered by houses — is the very image of sprawl. It was taken around 1890.

Why then this peculiar focus on the past 50 years? Because that was when the baby boomers were growing up. A generation who grew up in those postwar subdivisions preaching the need for change now recoil with dismay at seeing the social problems caused by subdivision life are hardly on par with those that fester in slums or the worst of our public housing projects. Yet “sprawl” is used almost universally as a pejorative, applied with as much malice, and as little accuracy, as the word “slum” when used to denote any poor neighborhoods. The fevered nature of the complaints about sprawl is reflected in the titles of such recent jeremiads as Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health And Money; The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape; and Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930.

Not surprisingly, this has happened during every period of major prosperity because during these times a greater number of families have enjoyed a greater choice of living arrangements. Predictably, every time this has occurred, in the judgment of certain already well-established groups, the newcomers have made the “wrong” choices. Also predictably, criticism of sprawl has virtually always been aimed at people outside the speaker’s or writer’s own circle.

Why then this peculiar focus on the past 50 years? Because that was when the baby boomers were growing up. A generation who grew up in those postwar subdivisions preaching the need for change now recoil with dismay at seeing change invade the sacred precincts of their childhoods. Thus the weirdly anachronistic cast of their criticisms. They castigate “Ozzie and Harriet” suburbs as if it was still the ’50s, notes Bruegmann, though suburbs were never exclusively white, middle-class bedroom communities even then. In fact, today’s Illinois suburbs are as diverse socially, economically and racially as the city neighborhoods they are beginning to resemble.

Nostalgia is merely one form of our cultural narcissism. Many people (and not only Americans) lament the loss of a countryside whose virtues were ruined by people who moved in just after they did. Only ignorance of local history insulates from self-criticism the people who throng to Illinois’ “heritage farms” on summer weekends to see recreated the kinds of places that the construction of their houses caused to disappear. In this they are like the elites who built faux-country estates outside Chicago a century ago. They didn’t think of their new houses as sprawl, although they must have seemed so to the farmers they displaced, just as those farms had seemed like sprawl (though they lacked a word for it) to the Potawatomi whose Eden the farmers had destroyed.

Sprawl is part report, part polite polemic. It is not, however, a prescription. This will frustrate some readers and annoy others who believe that an author who presumes to criticize reformers’ ideas without offering better ones is derelict in his responsibilities as a public issues pundit.

If critics are too often hysterical in advancing the case against sprawl, Bruegmann can be a bit glib in dismissing it. The fact that sprawl is a manifestation of city life with a long pedigree is hardly grounds for accepting it; so is tuberculosis. The flow of federal subsidies to cities and suburbs deserves a more sophisticated analysis than it gets here. Bruegmann is most sound when he is talking about what he knows, which is cities and their histories. Sprawl will become an indispensable primer on the subject, insofar as apologists will be able to mine it for insights, and critics of sprawl will have to tailor their arguments to take it into account.

Some will find it hard medicine to swallow, however good it is for them. Bruegmann offers an explicitly libertarian take on issues that many will find not just unpersuasive but unpalatable. For example, we can rue that suburban new house buyers don’t pay all the public costs of their private decisions, but, like it or not, avoiding social costs is precisely why so many Americans love the suburbs. “A proliferation of small governments,” he notes, “has made it possible for citizens not only to choose the kind of community and the kind of services they wish but also to have a larger voice in planning for the future than they would in a larger regional government.”

Usually, the kind of community citizens instruct their small governments to provide is one without the complication, exception and unpredictability of the city. The impulse is not one that Bruegmann (unlike most sprawl critics) presumes to judge. The educated cosmopolitan thrills at the chance to mingle on the street every day with people he would never invite to dinner, but most people do not. For them, the good life is lived in places where all their neighbors are pretty much like they are — whatever their color and accent.

Bruegmann argues that many things about our spread-out cities are good, and that while some things about it are bad, they are less bad than imposing a solution through government diktat. “The most convincing answer to the question of why sprawl has persisted over so many centuries,” he observes, “seems to be that a growing number of people have believed it to be the surest way to obtain some of the privacy, mobility, and choice that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.” The United States is, for the moment, a democratic republic; if sprawl is what most people like, most people — acting through the market or their elected agents in local government — will get just that.

The “problem” with sprawl, in short, is the problem with democracy. Changing present land use policies means leaving decisions in hands other than the public’s. That’s been tried, in other realms, with results that are often well-intended, but seldom wise. In the end, the reformers’ program consists of the hope that Americans will follow their advice and become better people. This is much to be desired, but not to be expected. Bruegmann argues that the remedies so far advanced for such social ills not only probably won’t work but probably shouldn’t work; banning land for new housing drives up costs, for example. “[The agitation against sprawl] is being directed toward things that may not be real problems,” he complains, “or problems that can’t be solved without causing severe unintended consequences and real losses for part of the population.”

Sure, the dispersed city causes problems — pollution, energy dependence, social exclusion, the built ugliness of the public realm — that merit attention. The old compact city caused problems too, at first. Most of these have been solved, or at least rendered tolerable. However, if people of influence refuse to engage our new kind of city, thus never coming to understand it, they are unlikely to be able to solve its new kind of problems. Fixing them by simply reining in sprawl, Bruegmann insists, is a bit like fixing a squeaky hinge by rebuilding your house.

James Krohe Jr., a veteran commentator on Illinois public issues, is writing a guide to the state’s history for the Illinois Humanities Council. He is a frequent contributor to Illinois Issues.

Alex Marshall

Governing

September 2006

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A popular planning book praises sprawl and ignores the mess left by misguided transportation policies.

Planning books rarely make the leap from Olympian hardback to more plebeian (and profitable) paperback because, well, most people don’t read planning books. So it’s news that Robert Bruegmann’s “Sprawl: A Compact History” will come out in paperback in October.

It’s easy to see why this book caught on: It is highly readable. The author, an art historian from Chicago, takes us on a journey around the world and shows us different types of sprawl in places such as Germany, Italy, India and Thailand. He also gives a short history of large-scale planning efforts, such as the Garden Cities movements and development in post-war London.

What makes the book dismaying, however, is that Bruegmann is essentially wrong in his overall thesis, which is that sprawl is mostly a product of people buying what they want and therefore a good thing. In Bruegmann’s view, sprawl has given the middle class the type of large homes that only the aristocracy once enjoyed. Side effects such as loss of open space or traffic congestion are explained away, and sprawl critics are called cultural elitists.

While praising sprawl as a populist triumph, Bruegmann discounts other explanations for sprawl, such as government-built highways and transportation spending and policies. That’s what most concerns me.

In my view, government transportation spending — local, state and federal — largely has created low-density, dispersed development. Simply put, a subdivision, office park or shopping mall can’t exist without a government-built road or grade-separated, limited-access freeway nearby. Just as early-19th-century canals produced canal-centered cities, just as streetcar lines and railroads a century ago produced streetcar suburbs and railroad-centered towns, so too freeways and roads in the 20th century produced sprawl. Transportation always has shaped development patterns, and government largely has shaped transportation. This trend stretches from the days when ancient Rome built roads across Europe to the modern era of states building highways and airports.

What makes contemporary sprawl so different is that in the past, development usually hugged a canal, train station or port. Now, roads and airports act as dispersers, flinging development out like a salad spinner. The degree to which a country sprawls can be predicted by looking at its overall transportation budget and the percentages spent on centralizing mediums, such as mass transit, and decentralizing mediums, such as highways.

Bruegmann tries to get around tying sprawl to a particular mode of transport by saying that cities have “sprawled from time immemorial.” Even the wealthy ancient Romans, Bruegmann notes, liked their villas in the country. But this is a false analogy. Sure, there were a few homes and farms outside a medieval city, but living just outside the walls of Barcelona in 1200 A.D. is simply not the same as living 50 miles from Houston and commuting along Interstate 10.

At one point Bruegmann says, “There is no particular reason to think that the decentralization caused by roads has been any different in kind than that caused by the railroads.”

But railroads a century ago caused cities such as New York and Chicago to expand. That’s not the same as decentralization. Overall densities were higher in cities after railroads were introduced than before, which is very different than what happened after highways were introduced. This is a matter of physics. Simply put, you can’t cram a lot of homes and businesses around a highway because all the cars used by the residents or workers need to be stored somewhere. Railway stations don’t have that problem. Plus, you need many more lanes of highway to transport the same number of people that one rail line can.

Bruegmann criticizes mass transit for not relieving traffic congestion. But mass transit seldom relieves traffic jams. What it does do is provide an alternative to them. Bruegmann also suggests that bringing highways into center cities might have improved access to them, ignoring the cancer of parking lots the freeways prompted and the surface streets they cut off.

There can be a difference between what we choose individually with our dollars and what we choose collectively with our votes. I personally would like to live in as large a home as possible, but I’d also like to live in a neighborhood with easy access to mass transit, plenty of bike paths and few big highways. That these desires conflict and must be balanced between my personal and collective decision making is something I recognize and accept.

© 2006, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.

Randal O’Toole

Regulation

Spring 2006

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Urban planners and other sprawl opponents believe that Americans waste land by living in low-density suburbs and that they waste energy by driving too much. The planners’ goals are to reduce driving and promote “efficient” land use by increasing the share of people living in multi-family housing and reducing average lot sizes for single-family housing.

To achieve their goals, planners in Portland, Ore., Missoula, Mont., and elsewhere have imposed minimum-density zoning codes that effectively force the conversion of existing single-family neighborhoods into apartments. If a house in one of these zones burns down, the homeowner may be required to replace it with an apartment building. To further discourage large-lot subdivisions, planners have used urban-growth boundaries and other tools to drive up the cost of land from a few thousand dollars an acre to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars an acre. To discourage driving, planners have increased congestion by putting barriers in roads and using highway user fees to build expensive but little-used rail transit projects.

There seems to be no extreme to which planners will not go to try to impose their idea of utopia on Americans who prefer the mobility of driving and the privacy of their own homes. Planners even forbade a historic Portland, Ore., church from allowing more than 70 people at one time to worship in its 400-seat sanctuary because letting more people in would generate too much automobile traffic.

Anti-auto and anti-suburban planners have been egged on by popular authors such as James Howard Kunstler, whose book The Geography of Nowhere calls the suburbs “trashy and preposterous,” and Jane Holtz Kay, whose book Asphalt Nation considers the freedom provided by automobiles to be “vehicular bondage.” Fortunately, we now have a book that takes an objective look at the complaints of sprawl opponents and shows they are groundless, thanks to Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History.

OLD TREND

Bruegmann’s book makes three major points. First, urban sprawl—that is, low-density development at the urban fringe—is not a new phenomenon; indeed, its history goes back hundreds of years and perhaps even to the first cities. Second, opposition to sprawl comes primarily from elites who are protecting their wealth and interests from lower classes whom the elites believe are less deserving or less appreciative of the benefits of low-density lifestyles. Finally, Bruegmann shows that most, if not all, of the remedies for sprawl do more harm than good, mainly by increasing traffic congestion and housing costs.

The first point should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of urban development. Yet, “the majority of books and articles that have been published on the American postwar suburban experience,” writes Bruegmann, “suggest that postwar suburbanization and sprawl were different in kind from what had gone before.” In fact, he argues, it was “different in scale but not really different in kind” (p. 43).

Nor is sprawl accelerating, which would imply the hand of government might be needed to slow it down. In fact, Bruegmann points out, house lot sizes have remained about the same or even declined slightly over the past several decades (p. 68). Instead, population densities have declined as a result of a significant reduction in household size—from 3.14 in 1970 to 2.79 in 1990—and an increasing number of workers, mainly women. The decline in household size “would suggest a rapid expansion in the need for housing even without a growth in population,” observes Bruegmann, while more workers also need more space to work (p. 60).

Thus, it should not be either surprising or alarming that the land mass of urban areas such as Chicago or Cleveland has grown even as their populations have remained roughly constant. At the same time, the densities of growing regions such as Los Angeles and Phoenix have actually increased in recent decades (pp. 62–63). Bruegmann concludes that “the campaign against urban sprawl, which became most strident in the last years of the twentieth century, was reacting to a trend that actually peaked some 40 years earlier” (p. 69).

Sprawl does not pose much of a threat to agricultural land or open space, Bruegmann argues. In the first place, converting farmland to urban land is not the same as “consuming” land, as sprawl opponents like to say. Farmlands themselves are highly modified from a state of nature (pp. 133–134). Moreover, “agricultural production has clearly outstripped demand,” so farmers are converting many former croplands to forests (p. 142). Ultimately, “the total amount of developed land today is probably no more than about 5 percent” of the United States (p. 143).

Bruegmann is typically cautious in this assessment; at the time of the 2000 Census, 79 percent of Americans lived in cities, suburbs, towns, or unincorporated clusters of 2,500 people or more, yet those areas occupied just 2.6 percent of the land in the United States. The 5 percent that he describes as “developed” includes rural developments such as highways, railroads, and agricultural facilities such as grain elevators and processing plants.

PROTECTING THE PRIVILEGED

If the problems of sprawl are not as great as sprawl opponents claim, then what is behind the war on sprawl? Bruegmann shows that most of the complaints against low-density development and the automobile come from elites who are interested in protecting their wealth and privileges. “The history of sprawl suggests that the two factors that seem to track most closely with sprawl have been increasing affluence and political democratization,” Bruegmann writes (p. 109). But “whenever a new class of people has been able to gain some of the privileges once exclusively enjoyed by an entrenched group, the chorus of complaints has suddenly swelled” (p. 116).

Ironically, at the turn of the twentieth century, most urban elites believed that cities were overcrowded and suffered from poor sanitation, rampant disease, and high rates of crime. The best solution, urban planners believed, was to get people out of the cities and into low-density suburbs. “Planners in the early twentieth century advocated urban dispersal,” notes Bruegmann, but “when it really happened on a large scale in the interwar years, they were horrified” (p. 173).

For example, in a statement that would be echoed by Kunstler and other American opponents of the suburbs, an English planner wrote in 1932 that “taste is utterly debased” in the suburbs. “This is the language of evangelism,” Bruegmann observes, “of a man intent on turning back the clock to return to God-given ordering principles.” As Sir Peter Hall records in his history of urban planning, Cities of Tomorrow, the main objection to the suburbs was aesthetic: middle- and lower-middle class people refused to build homes in the neo-Georgian or modern styles that the elites demanded.

European planners quickly changed their goals. Instead of trying to disperse urban residents to the suburbs, they now sought to keep the rural countryside “as the preserve of wealth and privilege” (p. 175). After the war, Britain and most other European nations passed laws that discouraged driving, prohibited low-density development, and subsidized transit and high-density housing.

The result, American planners say, is that European cities have become a model for what they would like to see here: people living happily without cars in high densities where they can walk to shops and take transit to work, while the countryside is unblemished by “McMansions” or big-box stores. The reality, Bruegmann shows, is far different. “Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans would prefer to live in single-family homes on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings,” he observes, and increasingly they are doing so (p. 201). Because of this, “by the end of the 1960s,” the planners’ regime “was under attack” (p. 179). In country after country, people revolted against the requirement that they live in concrete high rises and not have a plot of land of their own.

Most of the complaints about “sprawl”come from elites who want to protect their wealth and privileges.

Today, many of the high rises are occupied mainly by immigrants (such as those who recently rioted in France) while natives are increasingly moving to suburbs of single-family homes or duplexes. As a result, American and European cities “seem to be converging” (p. 92), with rapidly growing suburbs and declining central city populations. Just as Manhattan’s population declined by nearly 40 percent between 1910 and 1980, Paris’s inner-city population has declined by as much or more. Meanwhile, European auto ownership growth rates are “strikingly similar” to the United States, “albeit with a delay of several decades” (p. 79). European consumers are enjoying “a proliferation of large supermarkets, shopping centers, discount centers, and big-box retail outlets” (p. 201).

Despite the failure of centralized land-use planning in Europe, American planners are eager to apply the same ideas here. As in Europe, U.S. support for such plans comes largely from various elites led, Bruegmann says, by “upper-middle-class residents of central cities in the Northeast of the United States” (p. 130).

WAR OF PREFERENCES

According to Bruegmann, the rapid postwar growth of American suburbs took place because unprecedented numbers of people “have been able to gain for themselves the benefits once reserved for wealthier citizens. I believe that the most important of these can be defined as privacy, mobility, and choice” (p. 109). Single-family homes offered people privacy, and U.S. homeownership rates grew from less than 44 percent in 1940 to 63 percent in 1970. The automobile offered people mobility, and per-capita driving nearly tripled between 1940 and 1970. The increased wealth that came partly from increased mobility gave people more choices, and the vast majority chose to drive rather than use public transit and to live in single-family homes rather than multiplexes.

People’s preferences for the mobility provided by the automobile and the privacy of single-family homes are exactly what are under attack in the war on sprawl. Bruegmann dates remedies to sprawl at least as far back as the fifteenth century, when Queen Elizabeth drew what would now be called an urban-growth boundary around London and decreed that no construction could take place around that boundary. French kings soon tried to do the same for Paris. “Like virtually every subsequent effort to halt sprawl, these attempts were largely a failure, and London and Paris continued to expand outward” (p. 169). Though remedies to sprawl fail to stop it, they do impose high costs on the regions where they are applied.

One major cost is congestion, which anti-sprawl planners deliberately increase in the hope that it will deter a few people from driving. Planners divert highway user fees to expensive but little-used rail transit projects, spend money on what is euphemistically called “traffic calming” (which means putting barriers in roads to reduce traffic flows), and eliminate parking from streets in commercial and residential areas. The resulting traffic deters few drivers but it does impose huge costs on the regions that follow these policies, wasting hundreds of thousands of hours of people’s time and millions of gallons of fuel.

An even bigger cost is the loss of affordable housing. In 1970, many U.S. cities began using a variety of techniques to control growth and sprawl. These include urban-growth boundaries, purchases of greenbelts of open space, limits on the number of building permits that can be issued each year, and other restrictions on development outside of existing urban areas. As Bruegmann describes, in both Europe and the United States these sorts of policies almost immediately led to rapid growth in housing prices. Rather than excite opposition, such price increases create what Canadian planner Michael Poulton calls an “incumbents’ club” of homeowners who benefit from the price increases and therefore support ever-stricter policies (p. 162).

Sprawl opponents often argue that rapidly escalating housing prices prove their policies have made cities so much more livable that people are willing to pay high prices to live in them. In fact, all they prove is that housing demand is inelastic; that is, small restrictions on supply can lead to large increases in price because factors such as jobs, family, and friends play a greater role in determining where people live than housing prices. Nationwide, median housing prices have historically been about twice median family incomes. But in cities that have tried to control growth and sprawl, including Boulder, Colo., San Jose, Calif., and Portland, Ore., housing prices are three to five times greater than family incomes.

While existing homeowners appear to benefit from such price increases, the losers may outnumber the winners. They include landowners at the urban fringe who are not allowed to put their land to the best use, and current and future residents who do not yet own homes but may want to buy them in the future. Even the benefits for existing homeowners may be illusory: they can only take advantage of the wealth effect if they sell their home and move to a community that has not applied growth controls. Moreover, research in both Britain and the United States indicates that growth controls not only increase housing prices, they make them more volatile, as many Californians learned in the early 1990s when housing prices plummeted by 15 to 25 percent.

Bruegmann’s book reviews urban plans in several cities, but he gives the most attention to my hometown of Portland, Ore., which has received an enormous amount of publicity for its comprehensive “smart-growth” plan. Long before the planners gained control, Portland was a beautiful riverfront city in a cool valley surrounded by snowcapped mountain peaks. Bruegmann observes that most of the reporters who visit Portland see the city’s “alluring downtown and surrounding green hillsides” through the eyes of tourists. In contrast, Houston is “set on a low, marshy plain and subject to a climate that is, by estimate, uncomfortably hot and humid for a great deal of the year” (p. 217). Portland is obviously more attractive to tourists, but how much of that attraction is really due to anti-sprawl plans?

The real question is how well these cities work for their residents. Houston has grown faster than Portland, and as Bruegmann observes, “a higher percentage of newcomers to Houston than to Portland have been poor and members of minority groups.” Yet Houston has not only accommodated its new citizens, it has provided them a median family income that is only slightly below Portland’s (p. 218). In contrast, the fastest growing part of Portland is Vancouver, Wash., which Oregon planners cannot control. It is not surprising that housing remains affordable on the north side of the Columbia River.

Like Europeans, Portlanders have revolted against the planners. In the 2004 election, a majority of voters in every county in the Portland area supported a ballot measure requiring state and local governments to compensate any landowners whose property values were reduced by land-use rules, or to waive those rules for those landowners. This statewide measure received support from more than 60 percent of voters even though opponents argued it would kill Oregon’s anti-sprawl plans. Membership in an incumbents’ club could not overcome the voters’ sense of fairness and justice.

BRUEGMANN CONSIDERED

Bruegmann credits libertarian “attacks on anti-sprawl advocacy” with “a significant shift in opinion” on the sprawl issue. Yet Bruegmann himself is not a libertarian. He considers the 1950s Soviet plan for Moscow to be “quite impressive in many ways” because it did “many things well,” at least by providing housing that was better than Moscow residents suffered with in the 1930s. A true free-market advocate would recognize that the free market could have done much better than provide families with identical 600-square-foot apartments in high-rise towers.

Yet Bruegmann’s lack of libertarian views is actually one of the strong points of the book. As a professor in the architecture college at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Bruegmann is a natural member of the groups that typically attack sprawl. Yet his even-handed look at both sides of the many arguments in the sprawl debate reveals anything but a shrill ideologue. Indeed, his reviews of each argument are almost too soft-spoken, filled with “possibly’s” and “could be’s.” No one can accuse him of preconceived notions or a bias in favor of Detroit or suburban home developers.

Nonetheless, at the end of the book, he concludes that the best approach to sprawl is for Americans to make our own choices as individuals, not for government to make those choices for us. “If I shop at a suburban Wal-Mart rather than a downtown department store or choose to live in an apartment near the old downtown rather than in a single-family house on five acres in suburbia,” he writes, “these choices have an effect on urban form. If my choices are echoed by those of many other people, they can have a profound effect” (p. 225). A free market is the truest form of democracy.

John D. Landis

The Next American City

Spring 2006

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The Next American City Issue 10 - Transportation - Spring 2006 REVIEW: Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History by John D. Landis

Whether it be Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Joel Garreau’s Edge City, or most recently, Joel Kotkin’s The City: A Global History, city planners have long relied on those trained in other disciplines for a fresh understanding of the structure and organization of cities. This is the task art historian Robert Bruegmann of the University of Illinois at Chicago sets for himself in his new book entitled Sprawl: A Compact History. Unlike too many recent books on sprawl—for example, Dolores Hayden and Jim Wark’s A Field Guide to Sprawl, Andres Duany’s Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, and James Kunstler’s diatribes, The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere—Bruegmann approaches the topic with an open mind. He admits enjoyment of traditional cities and rural landscapes, but he avoids the all-too-common trap of seeing suburbs as physically homogeneous and socially uninteresting. Blessed with a historian’s keen eye, Bruegmann can’t help but notice that many things today’s anti-sprawl crusaders would have us undo about America’s suburbs are the same things that first drew people out of the crowded and congested industrial cities of the early-20th century and attracted them to suburban living. For all the books, articles, and media documentaries decrying sprawl, Bruegmann notes that the debate has generated far more heat than light.

Befitting its title, Sprawl: A Compact History is a relatively compact book. It is nicely organized into three sections: the first looks at the history of sprawl; the second looks at the various arguments against sprawl; and the third looks at proposed remedies for sprawl. Bruegmann’s strength is in synthesizing and explaining others’ works; those hoping for original research and fresh evaluative studies will not find them here.

The first of Sprawl: A Compact History’s three sections begins by defining sprawl as any urban spatial structure that follows a downward sloping density gradient—that is, a structure where residential densities are highest in the core and then steadily decline with distance. Bruegmann follows this definition with a succession of brief chapters on urban decentralization in ancient Rome, early-20th century New York, London, and Paris, and then finally, the U.S in the post-World War period. These chapters illustrate Bruegmann’s fundamental point that sprawl is hardly a new phenomenon: for much of history, decentralization was regarded as desirable.

Next, in Sprawl’s best chapter, Bruegmann carefully catalogs the alleged causes of sprawl (such as anti-urban attitudes, government housing policies, highway construction, technology, and the automobile), and shows how, alone or in combination, none suffice to explain the popularity of suburban development. He instead posits consumer choice and the demand for both space and mobility that comes with affluence as the real “causes” of sprawl. The suburbs provide many households with a desired combination of privacy, accessibility, and proximity to nature. This powerful argument is the heart of Bruegmann’s investigation. Unfortunately, Bruegmann leaves any technical or empirical discussions, as well as detailed citations, for Sprawl’s endnotes, making his arguments seem more facile than they really are.

Bruegmann attempts in Sprawl’s middle section to explain and interpret what he calls the “campaign against sprawl.” The early chapters in this section are a bit sketchy, but the last one, “The Third Anti-sprawl Campaign: Since the 1970s,” does a credible job of focusing on increasing suburban wealth and rising expectations as the principal sources of popular concerns over sprawl. Now that suburbanites have as much house as they might want, they are shifting their aspirations to the quality and unique character of their communities. Yet in his haste to discredit these crusaders, Bruegmann dismisses the merits of their complaints. Sprawl is destroying farmland and open space. It is producing an auto-dependent society. And it does facilitate community-sorting by income. These social costs may be worth bearing to obtain the private benefits of decentralized development forms, but Bruegmann does not make that argument, instead minimizing the importance of these costs.

Sprawl’s concluding section focuses on the various policies and programs that have been proposed to remedy sprawl. These chapters provide a good, albeit too brief, introduction to different growth management approaches, including greenbelts, regional planning, new towns, agricultural protection schemes, and Portland’s urban growth boundary. But by now Bruegmann’s die is cast: in keeping with the previous section, Bruegmann seems far more interested in critiquing such approaches by focusing on their apparent lack of effectiveness than in presenting a balanced evaluation.

Bruegmann is an engaging writer who puts his reader right in the center of what might otherwise be a dull and complicated subject. Yet, beyond its clever organization and engaging presentation, Sprawl: A Compact History suffers from two critical problems. The first is that it is too compact and, as result, omits key elements in the history of suburbs and sprawl. By jumping 2000 years from the decentralization of ancient Rome to the decentralization of London, New York City, and Paris in the early-20th century, and then another 50 years to post-World War II suburbanization, Bruegmann omits such crucial suburban milestones as Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux’s 1875 design of Riverside (America’s first planned suburb), Ebenezer Howard’s Letchworth Garden City, and Clarence Stein and Henry Wright’s 1928 plan for Radburn. The designers, planners, and developers who produced these iconic communities were active and reflective participants in the discussions of the time regarding the tradeoff between privacy and sociability inherent in suburban life. William J. Levitt’s Levittown is discussed, but in a manner that makes the mass production of suburban housing seem inevitable, without adequately crediting Levitt’s unique-for-the-time marketing savvy and understanding of what Americans wanted from their communities.

Short shrift is also given to the ways in which planners historically tried to use the natural landscape to enhance the suburban experience. In their plans for Riverside, for example, Olmstead and Vaux sought to heighten suburban residents’ appreciation of nature by fully integrating it into their designs. Today’s suburban subdivisions—which over-separate land uses and over-compartmentalize private buildings, public spaces, and the natural landscape—fail to achieve such harmony. For a historian to miss the formative stages of the very debate he is attempting to adjudicate is a bit surprising. Interested readers would still do well to turn to Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, twenty years after its initial publication still the best single source on the historical evolution of U.S. suburbs and the emergence of the debate over sprawl.

Sprawl: A Compact History’s second critical problem is that in Bruegmann’s quest to concisely define sprawl so that he might evaluate its pros and cons, he vastly oversimplifies it. Bruegmann’s “downward sloping gradient” definition characterizes sprawl solely in terms of density. The use of a single, simple definition may make it easier for readers to follow Bruegmann’s later summary of the sprawl debate, but it does little to improve the reader’s understanding of the full range of environmental, transportation, social, and equity issues associated with that debate. Other writers, notably researcher Reid Ewing and planning professor George Galster, have done a much better job of describing the multi-dimensional nature of sprawl, including its excessive land use separation, auto-dependency and poor pedestrian connections, and lack of functional open space. Even economists like Jan Brueckner, who for the most part agree with Bruegmann and see suburbs as a faithful expression of consumer preferences, have voiced some concern over the lack of transportation, retail, open space, and housing choices that characterize so many suburban communities.

By choosing to define sprawl solely in terms of density, and then concluding that there is no historical and contemporary case to be made against sprawl, Bruegmann steps into the same over-simplification trap that he accuses the anti-sprawl crusaders of falling into. Given Bruegmann’s commendable skepticism of the conventional wisdom, his keen eye for the built environment and natural landscape, and an engaging writing style, Sprawl: A Compact History could have been a rich and nuanced inquiry into a difficult and important issue. Instead and regrettably, it substitutes compactness for completeness.

Reid, Ewing. 1997. “Counterpoint: Is Los Angeles-Style Sprawl Desirable?” Journal of the American Planning Association. 105-114. George Galster, Royce Hanson, Michael Rattcliffe, Harold Wolman, Stephen Coleman and Jason Freihage. 2001. “Wrestling Sprawl to the Ground: Defining and Measuring an Elusive Concept.” Housing Policy Debate 12:4. 681-717. Brueckner, Jan. 2000. “Urban Sprawl: Diagnosis and Remedies.” International Regional Science Review 23(2): 160-171. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. 264 PP. $27.50, HARDCOVER.