A Field Guide to Sprawl

By Dolores Hayden with aerial photographs by Jim Wark W.W. Norton, 2004, 128 pp., $24.95. The latest book by Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale, possesses the earnestness found in just about every strongly felt critique of sprawl. But in addition, A Field Guide to Sprawl has two unusual strengths: a flair for words and a collection of stunning photographs. Hayden and photographer Jim Wark have assembled a series of 51 captivating two-page spreads. Each display contains a paragraph or two describing a particular problem or phenomenon — such as leapfrog development or impervious parking lots — and a photograph strikingly showing how the problem or phenomenon looks when seen from above. The sequence starts with “alligator” (an investment producing negative cash flow) and concludes with “zoomburg” (an area growing even faster than a “boomburg”). In between are entries such as “ball pork” (a publicly subsidized stadium for a privately owned team), “ground cover” (inexpensive, easily bulldozed buildings such as self-storage units), “litter on a stick” (obnoxious billboards), “pork chop lot” (an interior lot accessible via a long driveway), “putting parsley on the pig” (remedying a bad project through landscaping); “snout house” (a dwelling whose protruding garage dominates the street frontage), and “sitcom suburb” (an FHA-financed, Ozzie and Harriet-style postwar suburb). Many of terms are amusing (though not funny to the occupants of snout houses or sitcom suburbs). The richly colored bird’s-eye views make even a prosaic subject such as “gridlock” fascinating to pore over. A Field Guide to Sprawl could awaken some non-designers to the ways in which the American landscape is changing for the worse. The photos are so powerful that a reader may not even notice the unreliability of a few of the assertions in the text. Rows of mobile homes, as photographed by Wark against a dirt-brown Nevada landscape, are the epitome of bleakness. But it’s unconvincing to claim, as Hayden does, that “manufactured housing contributes to sprawl” because it often lacks landscaping, is frequently crowded together, and turns obsolete faster than conventionally-built dwellings. Her assertion that many Americans prefer low residential densities because they “keep house prices high” ignores other, surely more deep-seated motivations for wanting an acre or two outside your door. Nonetheless, Hayden packs a lot of information and a wealth of clever coinages into a brief, quick-moving text. The Field Guide will both inform and entertain readers who are disturbed by the wastefulness and disconnection of conventional development. u