Robert Bruegmann Writes Sensibly About "Sprawl"

by Sandy Ikeda
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 at 7:28 PM

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According to Robert Bruegmann, after discovering a paucity of non-polemical literature on the history of urban sprawl, he basically went out and wrote one himself. In his 2005 book, "Sprawl: A Compact History," Mr. Bruegmann aims "to look at this issue from a historic perspective and to examine the way the concept of sprawl was invented and how it has been used over time." He defines "sprawl" simply as "low density, scattered, urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land-use planning."

What we learn is that sprawl has been with us for a long time — "a feature of urban life since time immemorial" — its presence a function of wealth and the aspirations of ordinary people. From Babylon and Ur to Paris and Phoenix, folks have wanted to escape the woes of city life yet keep within a day's travel of its delights. Only recently, however, have large numbers had the wealth to realize this dream, especially in America. America experienced large-scale sprawl sooner than Europe simply because we got richer and more populous much faster than a bombed-out and earnestly socializing Europe, whose governments spent a great deal of their country's wealth on the repair and rebuilding of their ruined city centers.

Mr. Bruegmann reviews sprawl from ancient Rome to the three waves of sprawl in America and Europe (inter-war, postwar, and since the 1970s), each of which sparked its own anti-sprawl reaction. His presentation of both anti-sprawl and "anti-anti-sprawl" positions (with some familiar names popping up in the latter, such as Peter Gordon's) seems pretty evenhanded. Nevertheless, he explains that his evaluation is not exactly balanced owing to a gross imbalance in the literature.

Because the vast majority of what has been written about sprawl dwells at great length on the problems of sprawl and the benefits of stopping it, I am stressing instead the other side of the coin, that is to say the benefits of sprawl and the problems caused by reform efforts.

I think that much of the ideology behind so-called "smart growth" or more recently "sustainable urbanism" was and largely still is a reaction against a state of affairs that has long since evolved into new urban forms. Indeed, Mr. Bruegmann finds that

most of the sprawl diagnoses [in the current literature] were still based on assumptions codified in the late 1960s when American suburbs were booming and city centers seemed to be in grave danger of collapsing. … Whatever validity these generalizations might have had in the late 1960s — and even then they were far from adequate — they were completely inadequate to describe metropolitan areas by the 1990s. … Many of the city centers were roaring back. Densities were rising in subdivisions at the urban periphery, many of which were being swelled by working class and minority families.

An example of this trend is what Joel Garreau has termed "edge city," which, while it doesn't look much like a traditional "downtown" (largely because it tends to be outside the legal limits of cities), nevertheless shares the density, diversity, and economic dynamism that has always characterized living cities.

In short, "Sprawl" is what its subtitle says it is: "a compact history" of urban sprawl. A very useful book for the intelligent urbanist.

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(I just started reading William T. Bogart's "Don't Call It Sprawl," which I've so far found really interesting. Look for the review a little later.)

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