One thing that I've kept promising myself about over and over again, but never actually do, is write more book reviews. One of my ambitions in starting this site was to write lots of book reviews instead of posting them to Amazon or elsewhere. I do get plenty of views for my Karen Armstrong book reviews (which I will be transferring to my blog page), so there are people out there who are interested in such things.
This review is of course about the book Sprawl: a Compact History, by University of Chicago historian and Architecture professor Robert Bruegmann. I actually was loaned a copy of this book from a fellow activist, which saved me the immediate trouble of ordering my own copy. I still think I will get around to purchasing a copy sometime soon.
I've certainly gone through my share of academic tomes over the years. Bruegmann's book clocks in at 230 pages, along with 50 pages of footnotes and reference pages. For an academic publication, Sprawl is a fairly easy read, with no dense calculus equations, a mere 10 graphs and 23 images of various cities and urban layouts, along with replications of various plans of cities and models. The book is simply laid out, with three parts. The first describes sprawl from a historical perspective and looks into ideas as to why sprawl takes place. The second part covers the various anti-sprawl political campaigns which have occurred over the past century. Last, Bruegmann looks a prescriptions and remedies for the alleged problems.
Amongst items I noted were the following:
1) Early in chapter 1, Bruegmann notes that there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes sprawl. His footnote on the topic is over a page long. In the footnote, Bruegmann argues that "it has been the non measurable, especially aesthetic aspects of sprawl that have constituted the emotional heart of the debate on the subject."
The term sprawl has a negative connotation, much like the terms elitism or conspicuous consumption, but what's funny is that the target of that negativism has been rather ephemeral. An implied undercurrent is that sprawl is caused by other people and that it results from the poor choices by which others have decided to live their lives.
My comment: The definition issue should be of no surprise since we are largely talking about the study of social sciences and of urban settings. The entire field of urban studies is rife with definition problems, which often contribute to spill over problems such as having to control for data comparisons and mismatches. In case you want to debate the point, try determining what the population of the Houston metropolitan area is. Do you want to determine the population of the City of Houston, Harris County, the SMSA, the PMSA, or the H-GAC metropolitan area? Bruegmann notes that frequently when the urban population spreads outward, it triggers the addition of a new county to the metropolitan area by the U.S. Census Bureau. Metropolitan density may appear to plummet simply because of the addition of the new county, no matter whether the density of the actual urbanized portion of the area was rising and falling.
Since we don't have a firm definition of what exactly sprawl is, then anti-sprawl campaigners find themselves falling back on the old saw that I know it when I see it.
2) Bruegmann says that many of the things that anti-sprawl campaigners fear is based upon outdated data or evidence. For example, there is a pervasive fear amongst some that sprawl is accelerating and spiraling out of control. Bruegmann shows where the rate of new sprawl in most metropolitan areas is actually slowing down and that many cities are slowly growing denser. That statement is in fact true for Houston.
Bruegmann states that lot sizes reached their peak in the 1950's and 1960's, while houses built on newer lots since then have been getting larger. He says that quite a bit of newer development at the edge of urban areas consists of row housing and apartments.
3) Bruegmann writes that distant "exurban" sprawl, what could be described as very low density development in rural areas past the urban periphery, has been accelerating. This is mostly because the parcels of land are very large and there are more people (often very wealthy) moving out to those areas who still want to be within striking range of towns and cities to access their amenities. At the same time, we have seen the creation of affluent, distant work areas far away from cities where people make very long commutes to get to them.
4) If you are a James Howard Kunstler fan, it may be of interest to you (I already knew this) that the large cities of the ancient world, such as Rome, had population densities of 150,000 people or more per square mile. It's possible to imagine that Mr. Kunstler, who lives in a town whose density is less than 1,000 people per square mile, would be thrilled to live in such a city.
5) The first sprawl in ancient cities and those of the Middle Ages was due to activities which were performed that were often objectionable within the city walls, such as smoke arising from metal working or burial of the dead. Bruegmann correctly notes that historical cities faced the crushing economic burden of building and maintaining walls around their perimeters. As Barton Smith told us in class one day, there were economies of scale in defense, so sprawling outside of city walls was a problematic issue in a world where your enemies could come from out of nowhere. Suburbanites of the ancient world lived outside the walls of cities because they could not afford to live in them. They gave up access to services and protection of the walls in return for living in tiny hovels near roads. Meanwhile the extremely wealthy of the ancient world lived in extravagant villas near the seaside or other desirable country areas.
Intriguingly, Bruegmann notes that London was the first modern city in the sense that it abetted sprawl because for many decades it was the only city in Europe which did not have a wall around its perimeter.
6) Bruegmann says that many of the wealthy in today's American cities live in areas which were already inhabited by wealthy people at the turn of the 20th century. Unlike other places in urban settings where neighborhoods may rise, fall, and perhaps redevelop and rise again, wealthy areas stay wealthy.
7) Bruegmann describes the massive sprawl away from urban cores which happened all over Europe and America in the early decades of the 20th century. Until that time, it was the rich who had moved out of urban cores. Now the masses were rich enough to follow them. The availability of public transportation was augmented by the automobile. Curbs, gutters, sewers, street lights and electricity, which we take for granted today, were all installed and completed in this era. Contrary to the belief that it was people moving outwards, it was often the case that jobs in factories and manufacturing that moved outwards first, then families followed the jobs. This in turn left lots of cheap, empty space behind in city cores which later on were often used by new residents or enterprises that in turn helped to revive the cores of some urban areas. (My note - this just goes to show how complicated cities really are).
8) While writing about the central cities of Europe and America, Bruegmann states that he thinks that an average of 10,000 people per square mile seems to be a threshold whereby very extensive use of public transportation takes place. The two cities in America that have higher densities than this are Chicago and New York (I think Bruegmann may be getting a bit sloppy here as San Francisco also has density above 10,000 per square mile). Even then, use of public transportation is mostly a strong force only for transportation into central business districts. Or as Wendell Cox might put it, its all about downtown.
9) Tirades and battles against sprawl are often triggered in periods where there are large economic booms, such as in Europe and America during the 1920's, America in the 1950's, and in numerous places in the world during the 1990's. Those are times when the numbers of people with the means to move grow rapidly. Bruegmann writes that campaigns against sprawl often occur in the largest and fastest growing cities, which strangely enough are often much denser than smaller towns, cities, and villages. Brugemann notes that anti-sprawlers are much more active in Los Angeles than they are in Little Rock Arkansas or Lubbock Texas.
10) European cities have rapidly been approaching American and Canadian levels of automobile ownership and use, but I already knew that.
11) Bruegmann looks at the possible causes of sprawl. Anti-urban attitudes and racism are examined, but Bruegmann notes that minorities are just as likely to move to the suburbs as white people are if they have the money. As for "anti-urban attitudes", Bruegmann says that:
It is probably only possible to call Americans anti-urban if one accepts a specific set of assumptions about urbanity made by members of a small cultural elite. This group likes to think of urbanity as the kind of life lived by people in apartments in dense city centers that contain major high brow cultural institutions. In these dense centers, the believe, citizens are more tolerant and cosmopolitan because of their constant interaction with other citizens unlike themselves. Bruegmann goes on to say that most Americans, and increasingly people around the world, are rejecting or simply ignoring such ideas for an idealized city.
My note here - from my time of having spent 9 weeks in London, I can confidently say that having people live in dense areas does not make them any more tolerant or cosmopolitan than anyone living in low density areas.
Bruegmann writes about the idea that sprawl is "the inevitable unhappy result of laissez-faire capitalism." Bruegmann goes on to say that this assertion is a complete turn around of the thoughts of urban reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who believed that unregulated private real estate markets would inevitably lead to massively high densities. Benjamin Marsh, an advocate for the working poor, wailed that it would be logical for developers to crowd as many people into a single acre of apartment housing, as that would maximize their profits.
Bruegmann says of various government created causes of sprawl, such as tax deductions for home ownership, that other countries do (or do not) have such deductions as does America, but sprawl is still taking place. He correctly notes that the home owner tax deduction primarily benefits the rich and not those in the lower or middle class income brackets. Yet people with lower incomes buy homes anyway.
As for the "Americans do not choose to live in the suburbs because they would obviously choose a hip urban lifestyle over the dreary suburban life" argument, Bruegmann writes that this seems to point to an idea that greedy developers are in cabal with politicians to deny what people really want. Bruegmann notes that if developers were really to possess as much fiendish guile that is attributed to them, then they should be able to make as much money developing high density lots in cities as they do in the suburbs.
He also discusses the Who framed Roger Rabbit urban myth, where the demise of rail and streetcars was allegedly because General Motors supposedly bought up all the rail and streetcar lines to put them out of business. More to the point, Bruegmann notes (quite correctly) that motorized automobiles and trucks did not replace rail, trolleys, and street cars. What the automobile replaced were horse drawn wagons and carriages and it is important to note that the first automobiles were known as horseless carriages. It was buses that replaced rail and streetcars.
To get a visual look at this, I consulted my copy of Historic Photos of Houston by Betty Trapp Chapman. For the first 85 of the 216 pages of her book, there are very few photographs of automobiles or trucks. There are many photos showing groups of people who have neatly parked in front of buildings in their horse drawn wagons and carriages. There is a photo of a mule train of men and equipment moving along a road in South Texas going towards the oil fields. There is another photo, taken circa 1890, of volunteer firemen in a horse drawn service truck that looks to be about 40 feet long. When President William Howard Taft visited Houston in November 1909, he had a public procession where he was taken by horse drawn carriages and not in a street car. There are only 12 photographs with streetcars, including one where streetcars are jostling for road space with horse drawn carriages and pedestrians circa 1900 (it looks like the streetcar is going to hit a crowd of them!). In the next to last photo, there is a photo of a street car taken in September 1924 which has the caption, "Please step inside and look me over. I am one of your 15 new Houston street cars. I cost $13,000." That streetcar in 2006 dollars would cost $153,263. After the 1910's, there are no more photographs of horse drawn carriages or wagons.
12) The anti-sprawl campaigns: Bruegmann notes that aesthetic tastes of urban development amongst critics changes over time. When London continued to sprawl extensively in the early 20th century, architect critics at the time raged about the row housing that is a feature of London suburbs like Acton Town. They demanded that such development be stopped on grounds such as that Britain's farmland was being consumed. Fast forward to the turn of the 21st century and the spiritual descendants of those urban planners and critics rave these days about how wonderful those same suburbs are and that this is how developers should build cities because it economizes on space.
Bruegmann also says that the first anti-sprawl campaign in Britain witnessed the idea that building new roads filled up, ergo the argument of later anti-sprawlers "we can't build our way out of congestion" is actually far older than many assume it to be. As a side note, Julius Caesar banned wheeled vehicles from the streets of ancient Rome during daylight hours due to traffic congestion. No wonder when your city has population densities of over 150,000 people per square mile.
13) The anti-sprawl campaigns in the America of the 1950's came about, as noted above, because of the increases in affluence and population. William H. Whyte, he of the Organization Man fame, sponsored what was perhaps the first conference on sprawl and targeted Los Angeles as its epitome. Interestingly, Bruegmann says that Los Angeles has densified, but he says that the cost of transporting sufficient water to the L.A. metropolitan area has acted as a curb to more sprawl.
New arguments emerged, such as the costs of sprawl, social and environmental problems, arguments in the 1970's were advanced about the limits to growth, and attacks on the automobile became more and more shrill. Bruegmann states that the economic problems of the late 1970's such as stagflation, drove such concerns off the public agenda. However when Western advanced economies recovered and sprawl continued.
Bruegmann then goes on to list the latest wave of anti-sprawl complaints, which now include social concerns and equity problems, sustainability, and global warming. However the old aesthetic issues crop up again, which Bruegmann thinks is because societies have solved basic problems such as food production, shelter, water, and so forth. Since those problems have been solved, then people have time to - well - look for more issues to complain about.
The last part of Bruegmann's book covers various anti-sprawl remedies which have been attempted during these anti-sprawl campaigns, including a sharp analysis of the bizarre political marriage between Britain's Labour Party and the conservative aristocratic landowners of Britain which resulted in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. He covers regional planning, environmental impact statements, anti-road building and highway crusades, and the case of the highly successful anti-sprawl efforts employed in building Moscow. I will leave it to the reader's imagination as to why it was that the Soviets were successful in curbing sprawl in the nation's capital. He also notes that the most recent anti-sprawl campaigns have now drawn a backlash in which there are now people who are willing to speak up for benefits that are produced by sprawl.
This has been a long entry, but it hope it provokes interested parties into reading the book and mulling over what Sprawl has to say.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at November 10, 2007 02:42 PM