Sprawl: A Compact History

By Robert Bruegmann

University of Chicago Press, 2005, 301 pp., hardcover $27.50.

The opening section of this sharply worded book contends that sprawl is not new, not harmful, and not unique to North America. Ancient Rome, says Robert Bruegmann, an architectural historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, had its suburbium — the land beyond the city walls. Eighteenth-century England had well-off families who made their money in London but built their homes in villages outside the city. By the 1920s, sprawl in greater London grew enormously, with density plummeting as hundreds of thousands of people became affluent enough to obtain dwellings a considerable distance from the center. Sprawl, in Bruegmann’s view, reflects a popular preference, one that emerges almost any time an urban civilization achieves prosperity. Today’s dispersed, low-density pattern of development is giving Americans things they prize — in particular, lower housing costs and more space around their homes, he says. The biggest problem, Bruegmann maintains, is not bad commutes, loss of countryside, or any of the other negatives cited by opponents of sprawl. It is the rise of “cultural elites” that are attempting to stop sprawl and impose their own tastes on society. Sprawl: A Compact History relies upon a skewed collection of facts and a dubious definition of sprawl. But before looking at where Bruegmann goes wrong, let’s give him credit for identifying misleading or unduly pessimistic arguments made by some antisprawl campaigners. He emphasizes that dire predictions of sprawl opponents in the early 1970s — that the world would run out of energy because of automobiles or would run short of food because of loss of cropland — have not been borne out. A third of a century after the Club of Rome issued the alarming Limits to Growth, we now have large agricultural surpluses. “For years, sprawl opponents trumpeted the ‘fact’ that between 1970 and 1990 the [Chicago] metropolitan area grew in population by only 4 percent but grew in land area by 46 percent,” Bruegmann points out. The source of the 46 percent figure — the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission — fairly quickly revised its estimate downward, to 35 percent, yet the original figure continues to be bandied about by sprawl opponents. Indeed, the 46 percent figure shows up in the just-published (and generally trustworthy) Sprawl Costs (see review on this page). Bruegmann accuses critics of sprawl of also failing to note that much Chicago area land development resulted from growth in workplaces (as women streamed into the job market) and from growth in households (as the number of individuals per house or apartment declined). The author provocatively chronicles the movement of population outward from old cities in western Europe and North America, emphasizing that on both sides of the Atlantic, density is much lower than it was a century or more ago. Thus, when middle-class people decide to live in the city, they are not experiencing the same crowding and commotion that previous generations faced. He is intermittently insightful on how cities are changing.

Not about density alone

Bruegmann’s error — and it is a hugely distorting one — lies in refusing to acknowledge that sprawl is not simply a question of density and leapfrog development. It is a question of whether housing, retail, civic uses, and other activities are mixed together — or whether they are kept apart by single-use zoning, single-purpose road design, and narrowly conceived business practices. Those who fight sprawl are intent on creating neighborhoods, towns, and cities with walkable centers that people can reach not solely by driving to them in private vehicles. Bruegmann evades this crucial element of the debate and thus severely undermines his book’s credibility. Though he says he has “been working on this project on decentralization and sprawl for some fifteen years,” he seems ill-informed about New Urbanism. “The vast majority of new urbanist projects that have actually been built have consisted of relatively low-density residential subdivisions at the very edge of metropolitan areas,” he says. That was once true, but today it amounts to a falsehood. He seems unaware of urban brownfield projects like South Side Works in Pittsburgh; mixed-use redevelopment in Boston, Atlanta, Providence, Albuquerque, Chattanooga, Minneapolis, Memphis, and other cities; and a profusion of HOPE VI projects, none of them at the metropolitan edge. Bruegmann’s book, which starts out strong, seems, as the pages go by, to be more and more out of touch. He brushes off, in one short paragraph, the possibility that separating every land use from every other might lead to alienation or a decline in civic engagement. He doubts that mortgage redlining ever did much damage to cities. He approvingly quotes architectural curator Aaron Betsky as saying that sprawl “appears not to make sense, but perhaps that is because we have not figured out how to find what is beautiful in sprawl or because we do not yet know how to evaluate its forms.” Betsky notwithstanding, new urbanists and their allies have in fact produced astute evaluations of the forms of sprawl — from a financial perspective, as in Christopher Leinberger’s analysis of why 19 conventional forms of development often fail to hold their value over the long haul; from a social perspective, as in Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place, which identifies how gathering places affect human happiness; and from a visual or aesthetic perspective, as in works by Anton Nelessen and others. None of these appears in the index of Bruegmann’s book. Their absence suggests to me that Bruegmann would rather attack an over-the-top assertion made by Lewis Mumford 45 years ago than come to grips with the best current new urbanist and antisprawl thinking. Some of his historical interpretations also seem suspect. It’s true that Londoners have sought lower-density living for a long time, but when they settled into outlying villages or into rowhouse neighborhoods served by public transportation, with pubs, stores, and other amenities within walking distance, as was often the case, this hardly constituted “sprawl,” as Bruegmann calls it. Running through the text is an unpleasant vein of resentment. Bruegmann dislikes antisprawl reformers, portraying them not just as wrong but as “cultural elites” that want to dictate how others should live. Yet a realistic appraisal would show that the people speaking out about sprawl are not, for the most part, Old Money, Old Families, or the sort of individuals who run the Museum of Modern Art. They are members of the broad middle and upper-middle class: schoolteachers, architects, middle managers, foresters, journalists, and many others — mostly individuals who attended college and who care about their communities and the environment. It strikes me as disingenuous for a university professor to complain about people who make an effort to educate themselves about planning, design, community, and aesthetics and who take their concerns into the public arena. I thought that was the kind of activity that public universities were supposed to encourage. It’s called citizenship.