Sprawl: Interesting Point - Invisible Hands
(not my photo)
Is urban sprawl really an American menace?
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 6:42 PM ET
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.
Little boxes on a hillside
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.
Sprawl: Interesting Point - Invisible Hands
(not my photo)
Is urban sprawl really an American menace?
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 6:42 PM ET
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.
Little boxes on a hillside
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.