SPRAWL is a dirty word. Like weed or dementia, it鈥檚 insidious, a creeping malaise with overtones of irresponsible and conspicuous consumption.
鈥淢ost people don鈥檛 believe that they live in sprawl,鈥� says art historian Robert Bruegmann in his new book on the phenomenon. 鈥淪prawl is where other people live, the result of other people鈥檚 poor choices.鈥� Even the word itself looks and sounds ungainly.
But it seems we鈥檝e got it all wrong. Sprawl is not a new phenomenon at all, but as old as the city. What鈥檚 more, it is a sign of economic health and a democratising process that gives more people more choice over where they live. Sprawl is now the preferred settlement pattern anywhere there is any measure of affluence and where citizens can choose how they live.
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Firstly, though, what do we mean by sprawl? It is most simply defined as low-density, scattered urban development with no systematic planning, found at the edges of cities or in rural fringes within commuting distance of metropolitan centres. Critics of sprawl claim it is a modern and predominantly American phenomenon catalysed by advances in transport technology 鈥� notably the car 鈥� and government policies like tax relief on mortgages, and keeping housing areas separate from office developments.
Why does sprawl get such a poor press? The image most people have is of identikit family homes, four-lane highways, industrial parks and strip malls. Its critics claim sprawl is haphazard and wasteful, a threat to humanity and to biodiversity. They point to the way that it fragments natural habitats and contributes to climate change, bringing pollution and invasive, exotic plant species that change an area鈥檚 soil chemistry, hydrology and vegetation. A scourge of the modern age, in other words.
But according to Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, sprawl is as European as it is American. As cities became economically mature and prosperous, they spread outwards at ever-decreasing densities. So in 1801 central London had a density of 40,000 people per square kilometre, while today affluent cities rarely have more than 10,000 people per square kilometre.
Is there a limit to sprawl? Possibly. In several western cities, notably Los Angeles, population densities have started to rise again, both in the centres and in suburban areas. It鈥檚 not clear why, but Bruegmann suggests it could be an inevitable feature of advanced affluence, that just as there is a point in the evolution of a city where populations shift outwards, there could be another where they start to cluster again (see Sprawl: A compact history, University of Chicago Press, 2005). But like it or not, sprawl will not be stopped by tinkering with tax policies or regulating car use.
