Sprawl: everything you know is wrong, Part 1
Part of the speed with which human beings can recognize patterns lies in our powerfully adaptive ability to use Bayesian logic: applying a ‘prior’ or template of experience and then fitting isolated data points onto that hypothetical curve. Babies learn priors at a breathtaking rate, part of why they delight in repeating actions or movements, as each is an experiment to be crowned with a delighted giggle when the results replicate.
Look at that, it worked again!
But priors become world-views, and though that lens focuses, it also blinkers us:
Always looking to the future
Language too plays its role. Once high-yield securities were labeled ‘junk’ (by their inventor Michael Milken, no less!), their fate was if not sealed at least foreshadowed as they could not shake off their etymological birthmark. Control the symbols, Orwell’s O’Brien might well have claimed, and you control the debate, as we so often see in tussles over (say) pro-life/ pro-choice.
So it is fitting that urban architectural historian Robert Bruegmann opens his important new book Sprawl: A Compact History with a phonetic and symbolic deconstruction of the very word:
1. To sit or lie with the body and limbs spread out awkwardly.
2. To spread out in a straggling or disordered fashion: untidy tenements sprawling toward the river.
For what Bruegmann sets out to do, and then in 200 cogent pages achieves, is to stand on their pointy eggheads many off our age’s highbrow nostrums about urban planning.
“You are old, father William,” the young man said
“And your hair has become very white
And yet you incessantly stand on your head
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
“In my youth,” father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none
Why, I do it again and again.”
– Lewis Carroll, “Father William,” Alice in Wonderland
Bruegmann takes a positive delight in demonstrating that, when it comes to sprawl, Everything You Know Is Wrong:
His book scrupulously footnoted and peppered with illustrative diagrams and photographs, one by one he dismantles the idols of city planning. (Along the way, he also sprinkles fascinating tidbits about the history of cities, which I will deliver in a future post.)
“Sprawl is new.”
Sprawl is neither a recent phenomenon nor particularly American, as many reformers argue. It is, indeed, merely the latest chapter in a story as old as cities themselves and just as apparent in imperial Rome, the Paris of Louis XIV, or London between the world wars as it is in today’s Atlanta or Las Vegas or, for that matter, contemporary Paris or Rome. (Page 9)
“Sprawl is a uniquely American phenomenon.”
Virtually every argument leveled against sprawl today can be founded in descriptions of
In
“Sprawl is the result on untrammeled laissez-faire capitalism.”
The notion that sprawl is the inevitable unhappy result of laissez-faire capitalism turns on its head the analysis of reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were convinced that unregulated private forces would lead inexorably to excessively high densities.
Another problem with the private-market-as-cause-of-sprawl argument is that places like
“Sprawl is bad for the environment.”
The amount of land added to the country’s supply of permanent open space, including public parks, national forests, and other areas set aside from development, has been increasing faster than the amount of urbanized land. (Page 143)
“Sprawl is getting worse.”
There is little evidence that sprawl is accelerating and considerable evidence that the opposite is occurring. (Page 59)
Researchers at the Urban Transportation Center of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who have made the most careful study to date of decentralization in the region since World War II, have suggested that the rate of decentralization after World War II peaked in the 1960s and has been declining ever since then. (Page 61)
Early in the book Professor Bruegmann introduces density gradient graphs, with distance from city center as the horizontal axis and population density as the vertical. In two side-by-side pages he lays out both time and geographic comparisons of cities present and past, showing that whenever mobility and personal wealth increase, urban densities drop.
There’s the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone
All centuries but this and every country but his own
– “I’ve Got a Little List,” The Mikado
Another member of the Zoning Board of Appeals
“Sprawl is the result of an automotive conspiracy to cram cars on a streetcar-loving public.”
A remarkable case of the willingness of anti-sprawl critics to believe this despite all evidence to the contrary can be found in the persistence of the urban myth of the General Motors conspiracy. This theory, popularized by a man named Bradford Snell in the 1970s, was an attempt to prove that American cities lost their streetcar systems because General Motors deliberately bought up the lines in order to close them down. As many authors have demonstrated, this theory was never plausible. [T]he role of the automobile company was almost certainly insignificant. The streetcar has yielded to the less expensive and more flexible bus in virtually every city in the developed world, and most affluent cities, European and American, abandoned their streetcar systems with or without any intervention by General Motors. (Page 100)
“You mean the Toontown Trolley conspiracy wasn’t real?“
If Everything You Know Is Wrong, then what do we know about sprawl? What is the sane posture?
Papoon for President, He’s “Not Insane”
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
