Sprawling, After Midnight

Fire of Liberty

Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a great review of Robert Bruegmann's new book Sprawl: A Compact History over at Tech Central Station. While a lot of people at various college campuses, newspapers and in the government have been tying themselves in knots lately about "urban sprawl," - which is when various people have take flight from the large metropolises to settle in outlying areas thus taking the city's tax base as well as it stores with them - Reynolds notes that Bruegmann shows in his book that people have been moving out of these cities for hundreds upon hundreds of years to escape the dangers of epidemics, a desire to be in the countryside away from the frantic concrete jungle, escape from pollution, crime, or high priced homes/apartments like in Los Angeles or New York. Reynolds also points out the Bruegmann's book also quashes the critics complaints that urban sprawl causes people to get "above themselves" or seriously degrade nature and its infinite beauty. During college I did a little research and writing on "urban sprawl" but I doubt it reads as good as Professor Reynolds has to say about this interesting book, just take a look:

The biggest complaint against sprawl, as Bruegmann repeatedly points out, seems at core to be that some people are getting above themselves. Nobody, he writes, complained about sprawl when it involved the spectacular country estates of the rich: "Sprawl is subdivisions and strip malls intended for middle- and lower-middle-class families." He notes the irony of Pete Seeger's condemning "little boxes made of ticky-tacky" when they represented working people's hope for a better life, and compounds the irony by noting that those same houses are now "being reappraised by hip, young urbanites who see them as charming period pieces."

There's much more to Bruegmann's book, both in terms of numerous statistics, charts, and graphs, and interesting arguments (among other things, he suggests that low-density living may be more environmentally friendly, and may encourage its occupants to be more interested in the environment than they would be if they lived in urban warrens, since people move to suburbia and exurbia in order to be close to nature).

As Artemus Ward famously observed,

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that just ain't so." Bruegmann's book makes a strong case that a lot of the things we think we know about sprawl just ain't so. I hope that it gets the attention it deserves.

All in all it looks like Robert Bruegmann's book Sprawl: A Compact History, has finally introduced some sanity to the hysteria that seems to have emerged lately on "urban sprawl." So my best advice is for ya'll to get the book and learn something interesting.