Sprawl: A Compact History

by Robert Bruegmann

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226076911
• ISBN13: 9780226076911
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent resource for analytic thought, irritating for "true believers"

This book is neither an attempt to defend "sprawl" or argue against it. It's a scattershot of facts and analysis directed at examining, first off, what "sprawl" means and the history of forms of urban growth that bear resemblance to what contemporaries call "sprawl." Some of the facts are a stretch, but most are solid. My own evaluation was that about 1/3 of the analytic conclusions were tenuous, but the rest were solid enough to require serious consideration by anyone attempting to deal with some aspect of what they consider "sprawl." So, if you're a baptised and confirmed "true believer" that "sprawl is bad," this book may be quite irritating because it debunks some of the prevalent "anti-sprawl" myths. OTOH, if you understand Bruegmann's first point -- that "sprawl" is so poorly defined as to be a useless term other than as a token for someone's individual collection of "bad" forms of urban development -- you can gain a lot of understanding of the importance of context, history, community economics, and so on, in evaluating or planning urban development. I would guess that most thoughtful readers will find they gain new insights from many of the pages; and on some others, readers will roll their eyes. In the end, however, this is an original, well-written, and valuable book in any "urban planning" library.

This book changed the way I look at "sprawl."

I suppose I am one of those "elites" that Robert Bruegmann writes about in "Sprawl: A Compact History." I was born and raised in New York City. I grew up riding public transit and shopping at local mom n' pop stores. I watched many of my relatives leave the big city for greener pastures, and I noticed what a pain it was to go visit them on holidays because of the traffic. My parents refused to buy into the suburban lifestyle and stayed in the city. Even though my life and career path took me away from my beloved city, I have always tried to reside in the more urban parts of whatever area I happened to live. The suburbs never appealed to me, so naturally I was drawn to all of the anti-sprawl rhetoric and it all seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Bruegmann's book has changed that. "Sprawl: A Compact History" might appear to be "pro-sprawl," but to dismiss the book out of hand because of this is to miss much of the point. Bruegmann does a great job explaining some things that probably should be obvious: sprawl is not new, there are lots of appealing aspects of sprawl (even for city dwellers) and it's not going away. He discusses the history of what most people would consider sprawl in places as far flung as Chicago, Paris and Tokyo and demonstrates that it was going on for a long time before anybody called it "sprawl" and decided it was bad. He notes that the existence of sprawl does not necessarily mean the death of great cities. He tackles many of the prevailing anti-sprawl arguments including the idea that sprawl causes congestion and ruins the environment. The point is not to say that sprawl is good and should be encouraged but rather to say that sprawl is not all bad and we should focus on what can be done to mitigate the negative side effects instead of trying to reverse long-established settlement patterns. In that respect he does an excellent job. Does this mean that Bruegmann has turned me into a wannabe minivan-driving soccer dad with 2.1 kids and a yard with a white picket fence? Of course not. I have always been, and will continue to be, a city boy at heart. Bruegmann has given me reason to rethink how I feel about modern-day suburbia. Before this book I would drive through the suburbs thinking "Ugh! How could anyone want to live in this drab, boring, soulless environment?" After reading this book I now think "Boy, I'm really glad all these people live out here so I can afford my nice little townhouse in the middle of the city on my modest salary."

natural and healthy

Shakespeare wrote that "A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet," but the label you use to describe a phenomenon does influence your reaction. Refer to suburbanization as "urban sprawl" and you conjure up an image of ticky-tacky housing devouring rural landscapes, whereas if you call it "urban decentralization" you get an image of persons moving from crowded tenements to affordable, spacious houses in outlying communities with good schools and little crime. Bruegmann argues persuasively that urban dentralization is both natural and healthy. Urban sprawl affords more persons the benefits of privacy, mobility and choice, advantages which previously only the wealthy enjoyed. Public opinion polls in both the United States and Europe consistently demonstrate that the great majority of urban dwellers want to live in low-density, automobile-based communities. Thus, the ultimate cause of urban sprawl is affluence and the democratization of society. My favorite parts of the book are the sections that deal with the European experience. Many Americans who visit Paris and London return to the United States with a distorted, tourist's view of life in these historic and picturesque cities. They stay in the urban core and never see how most Parisians and Londoners live. Most Parisians -- nearly 80 percent -- are suburbanites, an increasing number of whom live in detached houses and shop in malls. Despite the existence of excellent mass transit and the exorbitant cost of gasoline, European cities are sprawling. This promises to be the most important book on cities since Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Instead of pontificating about how cities should be, Bruegmann describes them as they actually are.

A Cool Head On a Hot Topic

It was probably inevitable that a book about such a hot topic would provoke similarly hot reviews. But I found one of the great virtues of this book is that Bruegmann himself prefers to step away from the name calling and fingerpointing which have characterized so much of the sprawl debate until now. Instead, the reader is given a rare opportunity to check his or her preconceived notions at the door and read a book which does the same. "Sprawl" rewards the careful reader in proportion to the reader's ability to defuse such loaded terms as "elite" and "traditional city"; indeed, even the word "sprawl" itself. Bruegmann doesn't ask the reader to jettison his preconceptions--only to temper them, based on a careful and thorough study of the subject. When you've finished this book, you may or may not like sprawl any more than you do now--but you WILL understand that the subject is a lot more complex than you might have thought, and that the current attempts to halt it (or promote it, for that matter) have more far-reaching consequences than you might have supposed.

clear thinking on a fuzzy subject

This is a superb book on a subject that raises a lot of passions. I enjoyed many parts of it, not least the sections where Bruegmann discusses the (suspect) motives of those who go apoplectic over the very idea of sprawl. (Spoiler alert: their hostility is an affluence-based elitism that can gain a hearing only during economic good times.) Bruegmann's style is highly readable, but what makes this book excellent are three well-done things. First, he grounds his argument in historical perspectives, which completely demolish the oft-heard rants that American suburbia is a social, economic, and esthetic horror unique in human history. Second, Bruegmann brings a lot of accurately handled numbers to bear on the core question of populations and settlement densities, both current and historical. And he footnotes where you can chase them down yourself. As a corollary to the above, he shows how few anti-sprawl polemics show any understanding of population dynamics, or even how cities actually work in the real world, as opposed to cherished myths, mostly leftist. Third, he nails perfectly the fact that anti-sprawl sentiment - like anti-WalMart sentiment - always boils down to thinly disguised class prejudice. (Funny, isn't it, that you never hear complaints about WalMart or suburbia from blue-collar families, or those for whom a move to the 'burbs means a step up in living standards.) Negatives? I would have liked more illustrations - maps, diagrams, photos, etc. - especially in the historical sections. But those provided do the job perfectly well. This is a great book that will attract a lot of criticism, rants, and negative comments. But no one with an opinion on sprawl can afford not to read it. Bruegmann's bottom line on sprawl? It began with the first human settlements, and won't end until cities themselves cease to exist - or humans stop being human.