Posted on 12/28/2005 7:30:31 PM PST by Lorianne
At first glance, Robert Bruegmann -- a childless academic whose modernist apartment building sits in a dense, upscale Chicago neighborhood -- seems like the kind of guy who'd hate the suburbs. His peers and predecessors have, for decades, decried the unplanned, low-density, auto-dependent growth of shopping malls and subdivisions.
But his counterintuitive new book, "Sprawl: A Compact History," charts the spreading of cities as far back as first-century Rome -- and finds the process not just deeply natural but often beneficial for people, societies and even cities.
"Sprawl has been as evident in Europe as in America," Bruegmann writes, "and can now be said to be the preferred settlement pattern everywhere in the world where there is a certain measure of affluence and where citizens have some choice in how they live."
Debates over sprawl and urbanism tend to be emotional and morally tinged. Another new book, Joel Hirschhorn's "Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health and Money," blames sprawl not only for social isolation but also for traffic accidents and early death brought on by sedentary lifestyles. On the other side of the aisle, libertarians often excoriate sprawl's opponents as uptight liberal "elitists."
Although Bruegmann -- a professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago -- is making a bold, even contrarian argument, he discusses it with an art historian's detachment.
Part of what's startling is the author's defiance of the idea that sprawl was birthed in postwar America. His book is a history lesson -- one that finds the roots of present-day Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles in Augustan Rome or Restoration London. People of means, he writes, always have tried to get some distance from urban centers, often inhabiting villas outside city walls.
In the Middle Ages, most cities in continental Europe had walls to protect them from wars and invasions, keeping them concentrated and providing relatively sharp distinctions between the city proper and the "suburbium," as Romans called it, outside. But a quirk of geography, and England's early-modern political unity, led London to become the first metropolis to sprawl massively. The fact that Britain was surrounded by water protected its capital from foreign invaders, so the city stretched beyond its medieval walls. As London became Europe's most populous and dynamic city, it grew horizontally.
Like London, whose unchecked growth was denounced by the intellectuals of its day, Los Angeles was deemed a sprawling, tacky, human-made disaster. Norman Mailer described it as "pastel monotonies . . . built by television sets giving orders to men."
But Los Angeles was on its way to becoming highly dense, and greater Los Angeles is now, at more than 7,000 people per square mile, the densest urban area in the United States. Unlike most East Coast cities, even Los Angeles' outlying areas are very tightly packed.
And while the traffic, pollution and housing prices might dismay L.A. residents, Bruegmann insists that "the problem of Los Angeles is the problem of success: It's become so attractive that everyone wants to live there." And it has done this, he says, without paying the environmental and aesthetic price of more wide-open cities such as Atlanta and Houston.
By contrast, he argues, the so-called "smart growth" policies of Portland, Ore., have been ambiguous. Portland is eminently livable but has not reduced sprawl and remains a low-density city. As its density starts to climb, housing prices are going up.
One of Bruegmann's most shocking assertions is that suburban spread helps cities and their urban centers: Look at the way immigrants and the poor moved out of Lower Manhattan, for instance, only to have the area later reborn as chic living space for artists and young people. It wouldn't have happened, he argues, if the highways and houses beyond the city center hadn't siphoned off population, allowing these neighborhoods to be reborn.
Re aders may well blanch at this idea, delivered in the author's dry prose. In fact, many more cities resemble Detroit and St. Louis, waiting desperately for a revival to begin.
But Bruegmann argues that attempting to stop sprawl makes it harder for people to get onto the middle-class ladder, freezing the entitled class into place.
Sprawl might not be inevitable, but the author concludes that it is essential to the functioning of a free society. And tampering with it, he argues, is very fraught.
"childless academic" See, their is hope for America!
IIRC, Stephen Hawking hopes the human race will get busy moving
off the planet...before we all kill each other.
Anyway we look at it, we do yearn to breath free.
It's everywhere. Can't be unwound.
"the problem of Los Angeles is the problem of success: It's become so attractive that everyone wants to live there."
HUH! This guy must be crazy!
It's not man's fault at all. It's the woman he chose as a mate that fills a man's dwelling with as much crap as she can collect. No matter how many times he moves to a larger dwelling the progression is the same. He selects a dwelling with a large enough garage to fit his cars and some of his stuff. Over a short period of time he finds things stacked first in front of his stuff and then stacked where his car belongs. The next thing he knows I, er I mean he is scraping the frost off the windshield of his car all winter.(/carping)
One big irony (which is what modern liberal ideas have a habit of creating) is the fact that a decade or so ago some of this baloney was picthed as a way of keeping housing affordable. Hint: it hasn't worked.
The ratio of land to improvement values has radically shifted toward bare land. And the Portland Metro area real estate prices have moved up so much that homes are not affordable for people with little or no equity, or medium-pay jobs.
Biggest irony? You guessed it. Liberals in the area are spending governement money to look into.....housing affordability.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.