Nan Bauroth, a former community columnist for the Observer, e-mails to suggest I read “Sprawl: A Compact History,” [by Robert Bruegmann] recently reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. “This proves that far from unenlightened, sprawl has been with us since time immemorial for good reason,” she says. “Interested in your take!”
My reply:
I’ve seen the reviews, haven’t had a chance to read it, though it sounds interesting. Here’s my take, with the caveat that I haven’t read the book: The process of people moving out from cities is age old, due to the inevitable crowding, noise, and – in many cities until modern sewer systems – disease-ridden filth. People who could afford it built villas, country houses, etc., and kept a place in town. People who couldn’t afford it didn’t. I think that’s a natural economic process that really can’t be stopped.
But in the 20th century, the form that natural process took changed dramatically, as governments, influenced by planners and would-be social reformers as well as automakers, began mandating vast territories of nothing but single-family-home dwellings on mandated large lots, and other vast territories of nothing but stores, and yet more vast territories of office-only buildings (a.k.a. office parks). That’s not the way cities evolve naturally when left to their own devices. Plus, governments began catering to, and subsidizing, automobile travel in unprecedented ways. Traffic engineers came up with the theory that dead-end streets feeding onto large thoroughfares would make traffic move smoothly. They were right – up to a point. When there’s too much traffic, those thoroughfares get horribly clogged.
So while the process of suburbanization is natural, the form it began taking in the 20th century was decidedly unnatural, as well as more costly to governments (all those streets, longer sewer lines, more police cars covering more miles, ditto school buses, etc.)
In addition, in previous centuries, those suburban villages could easily be absorbed into the city as it grew out to meet them. Examples: Montmartre, Greenwich Village, etc. The zoning-law/traffic-engineer-designed suburbs of the 20th century aren’t so easily absorbed, with their highway-like thoroughfares and cul-de-sacs that distort traffic dispersal, their lack of pedestrian amenities, and legally enforced, unnaturally low densities.
I think suburbs in general are a natural phenomenon. What isn’t natural is the style in which Americans have been building them for the last 60 or so years. There’s also a lot of research pointing to some very harmful rules on the part of banks/insurance companies/mortgage firms, etc., that prevented city property owners (or anyone owning property anywhere near black people) from getting loans. The federal government, to its shame, supported and enforced that discrimination during the first half of the 20th century. The removal of official and unofficial red-lining is one reason, in my unresearched opinion, that city living has seen a renewal recently.