I'm at the end of a slow week at work, and I'm having a hard time mustering immediate passion or enthusiasm for discussing, defining or analyzing anything with rigor. However, I do feel up to the task of casually kicking around loaded terms that signify much more complex issues. For example, take sprawl. Sprawl is arguably the most visible issue in urban planning today, fiercely debated both by professionals and the general public in almost every city across the United States, so I should have a readily-available opinion or view on this -- or should I?
What is sprawl, exactly? Sprawl is a popular coinage because it richly evokes a kind of slouchy gigantism: one imagines development and growth to an abnormally large size, and all of the unintended consequences, tragic and common. However sprawl is defined, I think people emotionally object to it on two levels, with regards to particular individual concerns, and then the collective impacts on the landscape.
Multiple negative impacts on “quality of life” -- another debatable term -- are attributed to sprawl, including social isolation, as in the dependence of children and elderly on automobiles; poor human health, as in debates about obesity; energy consequences, as in our profligate use of cars and fossil fuels; environmental consequences, such as the destruction of habitat and open space; economic problems of scale, such as traffic congestion; or mistaken social priorities, represented by the vulgarity of mansion homes and endless strip malls. Sprawl is a convenient organizing theme for a lot of groups generally opposed to each of these consequences.
I don't disagree with any of these concerns, but I'm generally not receptive to each of these individual, separate arguments either, if only because each piecemeal fails to capture the underlying direction of a complex phenomenon. Plus, none of these arguments to me really explains or changes the single overriding reason why people continue to choose to move to suburbs. It isn't that complicated why sprawl grows in the New York City metro region, or others. People have a preference for space, mostly in the form of single, inexpensive, detached houses, and to some extent, they feel that they have more connection with nature in the suburbs than they do in dense central cities. This goes beyond culture, as the U.S. Census shows, it holds true for every ethnic and demographic group in most every region of the U.S..
Sprawl also carries a lot of cultural baggage as the successor term to suburbia. Academic criticism of the suburbs has been rightfully criticized in turn for focusing entirely on suburbia's supposed conformity and homogeneity. Despite the occasional explorer who actually went to the suburbs, and found it to be not that bad -- starting with Herbert Gans' “The Levittowners” in 1967, to the “Celebration Chronicles” -- arguments against suburbia are rapidly eroding for two reasons. First, the majority of people live in the suburbs now, period. Second, the same demographic forces that drive cities -- immigration, migration, economic restructuring -- all are manifested in changes in the suburbs as well.
Sprawl in the collective sense is a successor to, but not the same as, megalopolis -- the phrase and title that French geographer Jean Gottman used in the 1960s to describe the densely urbanized area stretching from Boston to Washington -- because we think of sprawl as particularly afflicting cities outside of the Northeast, though it certainly affects the Northeast as well. Urban sprawl also seems to be a particularly American problem in the way that megacities are not -- though New York and Los Angeles are certainly among the biggest cities in the world, we don't necessarily have the same problems as most of the other megacities dotted throughout the rest of the world. We don't have teeming masses of rural peasants packed into rapidly urbanizing cities: instead, we think that our problem is that our urban populations are spreading out too much.
Two more phrases that are personal bugbears: density and smart growth. Though density has been shown to have numerous benefits in how we plan and build cities -- making the jobs of urban planners at least easier -- we also have to acknowledge that people don't necessarily want to live in dense environments, and that in the United States, we have more space than almost any other comparable country in the world, that enables us to live at vastly lower densities. Finally, what's so smart about growth? That phrase always strikes me as a sop to those who cannot conceive of a world without growth. This is why I write so often about environmental limits -- there has to be a point where we stop, and the sooner that we realize this, the sooner that we can shape our institutions, desires, and selves.
There is a real contradiction between what we want individually, and what we can have collectively. The question is, does the fetishization of the terms sprawl, density and smart growth help us bridge this gap, or find new answers?
Technorati Tags: cities, environment, sprawl, urban, urban planning
No comments:
Post a Comment