It’s a Sprawl World After All: The Human Cost of Unplanned Growth — and Visions of a Better Future

By Douglas E. Morris
Feeling lonely, depressed, victimized by rudeness, and threatened with violence? You may be suffering from the physical breakdown of American communities, according to Douglas Morris.By Douglas E. Morris
New Society Publishers, 2005, 243 pp., paperback $17.95.

Feeling lonely, depressed, victimized by rudeness, and threatened with violence? You may be suffering from the physical breakdown of American communities, according to Douglas Morris. While others — notably Robert Putnam and James Howard Kunstler — have made the connection between suburban sprawl and social pathologies, no one has focused so relentlessly on this issue as Morris.
Unlike Putnam, whose Bowling Alone charted a reduction in “social capital,” Morris is not a trained academic. This may have freed Morris to make claims that are not exactly scientific, but nevertheless provocative and plausible. It helps that Morris, an MBA who has run several businesses and written five travel  books, writes concisely in a down-to-earth style.
Ray Oldenburg, author of The Great Good Place, notes in the foreword to It’s a Sprawl World After All that many sociologists have dismissed and even ridiculed the idea of physical determinism — that physical environments have direct social consequences — since at least the 1960s. As a consequence, “Mainstream sociology … obscured the destruction of community that has been ongoing since the 1950s,” Oldenburg says. Morris has no qualms about being tagged as a physical determinist. For example, he states: “The way we live our lives is determined by the physical landscape in which we reside. The way a society evolves is determined by the places where its people live.” Here’s another typical claim: “A country’s physical landscape is literally and figuratively the foundation upon which its society is built.” In the US, that foundation is rotten, he believes.
Morris acknowledges that he has no hard proof of the pernicious social effects of sprawl. Yet the circumstantial evidence is substantial. He reports in detail that violent crime was relatively low in the US through the 1950s, after which it rose dramatically across a broad spectrum of society. He cites a pile of convincing evidence that Americans’ spiritual and psychological health has deteriorated. American teenagers were four times as likely to kill themselves in 1988 as they were in 1950, for example. He makes a strong case that Americans have become coarser, more uncivil, and less friendly.
There are numerous possible culprits, he says, including video games, a consumer culture that promotes instant gratification, parents setting poor examples, schools not doing their jobs, and the frequently cited offender, television. Yet similar social and technological trends have not caused a breakdown in Europe, he notes, and asks: why has only the US experienced an epidemic of violence? “Even though television viewing has been woven into the fabric of everyday life in Europe, community life still reigns supreme,” Morris says.
Morris examines in detail this shocking statistic: the US produces 76 percent of the world’s serial killers. The serial killer phenomenon has exploded in the US since 1960, rising by a factor of 17 in forty years. Experts believe that certain people are genetically predisposed to be serial killers, Morris says, but the rate of serial killers is not uniform worldwide, so there are cultural factors as well. He cites leading experts who “all agree that the number one factor that turns individuals into violent offenders is spending a limited amount of time with responsible, caring, adults as children.” In other words, they come from dysfunctional families. In places with “genuine communities,” other adults can more easily step in to play that crucial role. That is less likely to happen in sprawl.
physical definition of community
Morris defines genuine communities in a physical sense, much in the way that new urbanists describe neighborhoods and towns. The thesis of the book is that these communities play a crucial role in holding together societies, even, perhaps especially, in the face of some of the corrosive effects of modern culture. Only in the US has this social glue been obliterated through sprawl and the physical breakdown of historic cities and towns, he claims. “Suburban sprawl is the first time human beings have been isolated and alienated from community life at such a coordinated, societal level,” he says.
Morris offers an extensive list of ways that Americans can rebuild their communities, and here he recognizes the potential role of New Urbanism. “Though it has its detractors,” he says, “New Urbanism is in the vanguard of helping to recreate genuine communities.” His proposals for changing zoning codes, rebuilding public transit systems, redeveloping historic settlements, and the like have been made before and in greater detail by other authors.
Furthermore, implementing those ideas can be daunting for individuals, so Morris is at his most effective when he makes more personal recommendations. Everything from finding and moving to a genuine community, to volunteering, to helping children learn basic social skills and manners is covered. My favorite is a section on cultivating the habit of acknowledging and connecting with strangers in public spaces. The key to greeting strangers, he says, is to expect absolutely nothing in return. “Remember that by being polite and friendly and making an effort to connect with others you will be acting in a way that has not been considered normal in America for a long time,” Morris says.
Morris avoids parsing issues in ways that pertain to particular classes or racial groups. He does discuss the effects of sprawl on children and senior citizens, but these apply to everyone at some point in their lives. In taking this approach he sticks to the point that when the physical structure of community unravels, everybody suffers. He also avoids blaming bogeymen such as the housing industry, planners, and the like. The discussion on the origins of sprawl, written as a 30-page chapter, is placed in the back of the book as an appendix so as not to interfere with the book’s main thrust. Here he points some fingers, particularly at the automobile and oil industries for buying up and dismantling streetcar lines, but there is plenty of blame to go around. If destruction of communities is a crime, Morris seems to be saying, it is one that we are perpetrating on ourselves.