SUBURBAN SPRAWL
What Causes it?
1.
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7.
White flight
Technology
Government subsidizes
Space/Land/Entropy
Personal Preferences
Government Policies
Media
America’s enduring romance
with the automobile
From the dawn of the automobile age,
government has provided the right of way
for cars, trucks, and buses, investing
billions of dollars in highways, streets,
traffic controls, and other essential
infrastructure
There is tremendous political appeal of
the automobile, derived primarily
from the enhancement of personal
mobility and freedom of movement.
There is a critical interplay between
automotive transport and urban
development that created the sprawling
low-density contemporary metropolis, an
urban form utterly dependent on
automobile and highway serving a
population that resists efforts to limit
freedom of movement or increase the
costs of automotive use.
• Perhaps critics overestimate the dangers
of sprawling urban development and
global warming; they often promote
expensive and inefficient rail transit
schemes; and they propose land use and
travel regulations that are antithetical to
the American ideals of freedom and
mobility.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(suburbs)
• Avila discusses the “physical and cultural
boundaries that distinguish white space
from black space”
• Does this distinction still exist today?
• San Fernando Valley example
• Perhaps the culture of white flight is over
• White institutions are now becoming
diversified
– Sports
– Media
– Walt Disney: Mulan, Pocahontas
• Avila - Growing frustration with the
freeway and the automobile. The age of
the freeway maybe passing
What to do about sprawl?
• Nothing? – as population grows people will
fill out the surrounding area. First with low
density building but later with higher
density (edge cities)
Calthorpe and Fulton
• Planning (designing)
• “Whole systems” approach
• “the real illusion…is that we cannot control
the form of our communities.
• “the problem is not that our suburbs and
cities are lacking design but that they are
designed according to failed principles
with flawed implementation.
What are the failed principles?:
1. Specialization
2. Standardization
3. Mass Production
• Specialization meant that each land useresidential, retail, commercial, or civic-was
isolated and developed in isolation without
any responsibility for the “whole.”
• Standardization refers the “one size fits all”
mentality.
• Mass production – the logic of mass
production moves relentlessly toward
ever-increasing scales, which in turn
reinforces the specialization and
standardization.
Is sprawl that bad?
• “People uniformly long for an architecture
that puts detail and identity back into what
have too often become generic, if
functional, buildings.
• Siegel: “But sprawl brings enormous
benefits and is in part an expression of the
new high-tech economy whose campuslike office parks on the periphery of urban
areas have driven the economic boom.
• Rising income and employment, combined
with declining interest rates, have allowed
a record number of people (including
minorities) to purchase homes for the first
time, reflecting upward mobility for the
aspiring lower middle class
• Suburban growth can also help the central
city. In the Philadelphia area, economic
growth in the surrounding area helped
offset the job losses in the city by creating
new industries. 20 percent of the city
residents commute to the suburbs.
Hayden: New Urbanism
(planned sprawl)
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No more housing subdivisions
No more shopping centers
No more office parks
Solution: new suburban neighborhood with
a master plan, tight building codes, narrow
streets, attractive public places, and
dedicated open spaces.
• Seaside, Florida
– Extended porch-sitting
– Leisurely strolling
– sidewalks!!!!!
– No lawns?
– Small lots
– High density
– HOA
– 300 houses and few full-time residents