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What is Sprawl?

The US House of Representatives defined sprawl qualitatively, saying: “[w]hen you cannot tell where the country ends and a community begins, that is sprawl.” Al Gore likened sprawl to “playing leapfrog with a bulldozer.” Jerry Weitz and Terry Moore define sprawl by measuring “the degree to which developments touch each other” and as discontinuous. Robert Bruegmann defines sprawl as: “low density, scattered, urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land-use planning."

Clearly, there is no consensus definition for sprawl; what is clear is that sprawl is a hot topic. On one side, the champions of sprawl, led by Joel Kotkin and Robert Bruegmann, are raising the flag of economic development and individualism. On the other side, the skeptics and detractors of sprawl base their arguments on the environmental and social costs. To be clear, I am part of the latter, the detractors. Robert Bruegmann’s definition of sprawl will be employed for consistency.

The consequences of sprawl are many and the stakes are high. By the year 2030 it is estimated that half of the built world we live in will have been created after the year 2000. We are in the middle of a period of explosive growth. A movement towards compact growth is essential for the health and vitality of our society and environment. The use of zoning and land use controls, in their present form and implementation, are inadequate to curb low-density urban development and require other tools to be employed.

How do we get to there from here?

Based on the aforementioned empirical and theoretical research, a deeply critical problem for the United States is the creation of communities that foster social solidarity and sustainable development. Specifically, the creation of such communities requires the combating of sprawl. Such communities put less stress on society and the environment. A recent study by Stone, Mednick, Holloway and Spak in the Journal of the American Planning Association analyzed the effectiveness of compact growth, not low-density growth, to combat air pollution. The results of the study found that a 10% increase in density would cause a 3.5% reduction in "household vehicle travel and emissions." The spatial layout of society has a deep connection to the health and longevity of our physical and social world as demonstrated by Holloway and Spak. There are a couple of possible scenarios that we could choose as a society to implement more compact growth: the business-as-usual scenario and the alternative scenario, which umbrellas the myriad possibilities for change.

The easiest and the most dangerous decision to make is the non-decision. If we deem low-density development as a benign product of a market economy and do nothing, then we should expect a progression of the norm. Projecting the future built landscape based on current trends in suburban and urban development we will find ourselves with the same problems we have today, only more exacerbated. Burchfield, Overman, Puga, Turner in The determinants of urban sprawl: A portrait from space found that by 1992 only 1.92% of the contiguous United States was urbanized. In 1972 1.29% was urbanized. That is a change of .63% over the course of 20 years. While Burchfield, etc… use this data to downplay the effect of low-density development on the US I find this to be quite alarming. A gross misrepresentation of growth in the US over the past 400 years before 1976 that will nevertheless help us think more clearly about the data would be to divide 1.29% by 20 years. What we get is the average percent growth for each twenty year period dating back to the 17th century. Our result is .06%. Compare that to the percent change from 1972 to 1992, .63%, and the rapidity of development in the United States becomes tangible. If we do nothing but let the status quo continue we will soon be consuming more land than our environment can handle.

Our society, as discussed before on this blog, is very delicate and needs lengthy contact between its interdependent parts to congeal and create a cohesive whole. Therefore, if we do nothing and allow low-density development to spread, then our society may never catch up.

The data above illustrates the quickening speed of development of land. Other data tells us that the average household in America moves every five years. It takes just about five years to create deep community ties and we are not allowing for these relationships to flourish. It will be easy enough to decide if society is becoming cohesive or fragmenting. Only time will tell if society is cohering. However, today we have the opportunity to make sure that society has time to knit together by fostering more compact communities that do not require people to move every five years.

Labels: Land Use, Sprawl, Urban Planning, Zoning

# posted by J Keller : 2:26 PM