Sprawl: everything you know is wrong, Part 2
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
What then is sprawl?
Google ’sprawl’ and this is the fourth image you see
The term ’sprawl’ has never had a coherent or precise definition. This has been one of the reasons it has been such a powerful polemical tool. Thinking of it as a blank screen on which a great many people project their own feelings of discontent with contemporary urban conditions is a good way to approach the history of the anti-sprawl movement. Because of the lack of a precise agreement about what sprawl is, individuals have been free to rally around certain broad but quite abstract concepts as a way to explain what is wrong with developments they see around them without necessarily agreeing on any specific diagnosis of the problems or any concrete set of prescriptions. (Page 115)
The most commonly accepted and objective characteristics attributed to sprawl [are] that it involves low-density, scattered development with little overarching regional land-use planning. (Page 9)
What causes it?
The history of sprawl suggests that the two factors that seem to track most closely with sprawl have been (1) increasing affluence, and (2) political democratization
A great diagram on page 110 plots average urban density and per-capita income in an inverse linear relationship.
In places where citizens have become more affluent and have enjoyed basic economic and political rights, more 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. (Page 109)
In fact, today’s sprawl is tomorrow’s new urbanist treasure.
In the nineteenth century,
In the second half of the twentieth century highbrow opinion finally 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. (Page 26)
Indeed, UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has recently been under ferocious political attack for his ill-considered scheme to demolish many of them.
Sprawl has less to do with low-density development per se and much more to do with what kind of development:
Very few individuals link sprawl with the spectacular British villas and gardens of the French Riviera created in the 1920s or the great country houses built by American industrialists at the turn of the century on northern
If hell is other people, then sprawl is where other people choose to live.
Sprawl is subdivisions and strip malls intended for middle- and lower-middle-class families. (Page 151)
In the same vein, a McMansion is a house bigger and more ostentatious than I would live in:
Today it is notoriously ‘McMansions,’ which could be defined as houses judged by any given observer to be excessive in size and stylistic pretension. (Page 151)
And why is the view of sprawl down a long nose?
Many members of cultural elites are not interested in hearing about the benefits of increased choice for the population at large because they believe that ordinary citizens, given a choice, will usually make the wrong one. (Page 111)
Cultural snobbery permeates Bruegmann’s sprawl critics, a cry familiar to me because (and this is my prior) every day I hear plaints against ‘those people’ who live in affordable housing.
- Those people aren’t like us.
- Those people can’t be trusted to choose.
- Those people will ruin the neighborhood, drop the property values, overrun the schools with their offspring, spray the walls with their graffiti, and on and on.
“For their own good, we must prevent them from moving in next to us.” I swear I can hear people thinking this if not directly saying it.
All of this I reject. People are smart.
While there may be market failures, it is all too tempting to slap that label on any current condition to which any observer takes exception. At the same time, for reasons I have previously documented, sustainable affordable housing is not a creature of the pure market: slums are economically rational and an inevitable output of markets: not a market failure but a societal failure.
Thus, amid Professor Bruegmann’s welter of insightful data, I have only one quibble. In its latter quarter, the book tails off slightly, for after demolishing the Ptolemaic urban-planning paradigm:
Urban planners are the center of the universe … aren’t they?
That the remedies for high-rise density look very much like the remedies for low-density sprawl suggests that from the beginning many experts thought they had the answer to urban problems. They just needed to find the correct problem to solve with it. (Page 171)
… Professor Bruegmann then offers us no new urban cosmology, no Kuhnian paradigm shift to take its place. Still, perhaps a complete overturn of the established order is enough for one book, leaving the creation of a new one for his next book, especially when that first book provides Easter eggs like this:
An argument against the construction of railroads [was] made by the Duke of Wellington in the nineteenth century. Railroads, in the mind of the duke, ‘only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.’ (Page 132).
No iron horse for the Iron Duke
