Yule Heibel's Library tagged sprawl →  View Popular, Search in Google

Yep.
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In recent months, Dr. Jackson has released another scholarly book, an edited collection on the topic, called Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Wealth, Well-Being, and Sustainability (Island Press), and he is also the host of a four-part miniseries called Designing Healthy Communities, which will air on public television starting this week. The series, which features a companion book, is clearly meant to sway public opinion.

"If we are going to change the way we build our communities, it has got to be done because of the demand of the citizenry—a demand that the average, very busy local political leader can understand," Dr. Jackson says. "We humans are so adaptable that we look at the world that we are in and we think, It has to be this way. But everything around us was an idea in someone's head before it was built. In large part, the idea behind the series is to alter what's in our head."
(...)
In the mainstream media, the work of Dr. Jackson and researchers with similar interests has been pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-grabbing headline: "Suburbia Makes You Fat." But his focus in Designing Healthy Communities is actually broader than that, with as much emphasis on our need for social connection and beauty as on our need for physical activity. (...)

The series also laments the loss of a social contract in America, looking at places like Detroit, Syracuse, and Oakland, Calif., where crushing poverty or pollution have hampered or even dissolved once-thriving communities. (...)

He also challenges the free-market, individualist ideology that has become popular in recent years. Communities and public health are things we build together, with the help of good planning and effective government, Dr. Jackson contends—even as companies that sell junk food, oil, cars, and sprawl pump money into politics and advertising to try to push society in the other direction.

"The fundamental paradigm that nobody else matters but me is making us fundamentally unhealthy and unhappy," he says. "This is a myth that has been foisted upon us by those that profit from this belief system."
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richard_jackson chronicle_of_higher_education sprawl cities urbanism socialtheory socialcritique

Yes, much more productive to see both cities and small towns through an economic lens, and to encourage resilience in place and civic engagement.
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“To me, it seemed a little preachy,” he says. “These people who lived in urban areas would come out and tell me how to live, tell me that you shouldn’t enjoy living where you do, you shouldn’t like your job, you shouldn’t feel good about the lifestyle that you’re living because it’s bad, and what we’re doing is good. What you’re doing is dumb and what we’re doing is smart. What you’re doing is sprawl, and what we’re doing is smart growth.”

(It’s interesting here to pause and ponder if “sprawl” is one of those words that naturally sounds odious – like “phlegm” or “yuck” – or if it has just taken on that connotation as a result of so much sneering).

Marohn says he has realized over the past decade that he and the New Urbanists are actually often talking about the same thing. The urban experience and the small-town experience have more in common than people think. And they’ve both been distorted by the suburban experiment. The picture looks different. In cities, it looks like an army of surface parking lots has devoured our downtowns. Small towns have also been hallowed out at the core and nipped at their edges by encroaching subdivisions.

But the effect is the same, Marohn says: an erosion of civic space, which has led to an erosion of the financial viability of communities. And this is the language he uses to talk about planning – the language of economics, of debt and prosperity and gas prices.
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cities atlantic_cities sprawl density

Fascinating imagery. I can't help but hope that the ability to see / map / visualize what we're doing will help inform better choices.
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Las Vegas's built environment is full of absurdities. The city's development patterns showcase a tension between the natural (desert) and the built (the planned communities that litter the landscape).

They also serve as visual symbols of America's 2008 housing bubble. Anticipating rapid growth, developments fail to connect to each other, confidently (or, perhaps thoughtlessly) leaving the future to fill the spaces between.

Below is a collection of satellite imagery via Google Maps that showcase some of these bizarre building patterns.
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atlantic_cities las_vegas google_earth sprawl suburban_style landscape urban_development

More on David Owen's 3/17 talk in Vancouver, organized by former Mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan:
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Owen's speaking engagement in Vancouver is being organized by the Global Civic Policy Society of ex-mayor Sam Sullivan.

Sullivan, a former politician who takes pride in taking on hard issues, pushed the City of Vancouver during his term to adopt EcoDensity, his brainchild concept that seeks to build a greener city through greater population densities.

Now an adjunct professor at the UBC school of architecture and landscape architecture, a position he took on starting in January this year, Sullivan reflected on how he changed the way many Vancouverites view density.

"I noticed that when people would come to public hearings after the EcoDensity initiative started, it was very rare to hear…[them] say density is bad," Sullivan said with an amused laugh in a phone interview with the Straight. "What they would say is: 'I'm not against density, but not here.'"

According to Sullivan, Owen will also help him launch what he called the Centre for Market Urbanism. "The idea is that government has a lot of responsibility for creating sprawl," Sullivan said. "There's a great demand by the market for increased density. And because government is constantly saying 'no' to density, we now have the sprawl we have across the region."
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Victoria could learn from this.

david_owen sam_sullivan density sprawl urban_development vancouver market_urbanism

Another Lincoln Institute publication, abstracted on this webpage. Interesting comment re. differences between infill policies in cities with little population growth (where I live, for example) vs. infill in cities with rapid population growth:
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Policies aimed at reducing fragmentation should be clearly distinguished from policies aimed at increasing the density of built-up areas. Encouraging infill in cities with little population growth is qualitatively different from encouraging infill in cities with rapidly growing populations. In the former, it can form the backbone of an effective ‘smart growth’ policy. In the latter, it is overshadowed by the urgent need to prepare vast areas for projected outward expansion.
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lincoln_institute density cities infill growth sprawl

Must-see photo essay:
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Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. A guest stated that there were "enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years". Boom and bust residential development has drastically affected parts of southwest Florida for decades now, and I spent some time (with the help of Google Earth), looking around the area. With permission from the fine folks at Google, here are a few glimpses at development in southwest Florida. (26 photos total)
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sprawl suburban_style suburbia suburbs florida land_use

Nice presentation by Ellen Dunham-Jones on retrofitting suburbia. "We need to retrofit the corridors" - so true. Let new urbanism do a do-over of arterials. "Restore the local ecology" - restore the original wetlands: hmm, that's what the City of Victoria should have done at the View St. and Vancouver St. intersection! Another idea: "eco-acre transfer." Possible problems: astro-turf and urban streetscapes but suburban parking ratios.

suburbia video ellen_dunham_jones ted_conference sprawl retrofit

It's obvious that without efforts at TOD (transit-oriented development) there is a danger of HSR (high speed rail) making sprawl more attractive. But if we get the development angle down right, there's no reason things couldn't turn out as they have in Europe, where HSR does *not* equal sprawl. Why should it do so in North America? Are we that stupid - or greedy? (Don't answer that...)
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In theory (and hopefully in practice) the priorities of HSR in the U.S. are a wide mix of economic, environmental, and urban planning, goals. But some urban planners are arguing that an unintended consequence of actually building HSR lines could be a major step backwards in the notion of sustainable living.

(...SNIP...)
Granted, as Yonah Freemark points out, this foretelling of sprawl takeovers could be all speculation — there’s been no link established between existing HSR stations in France and Spain and an epidemic of suburban growth. Also there’s no evidence that the “commute from afar” attitude has been embraced en masse in the parts of the U.S. serviced by fast trains — how many people live in Philadelphia and take the Acela to New York City every day?
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Bingo. Do TOD, plan better, and make living in cities attractive through amenities (including community).

high_speed_rail transportation transit sprawl transit_oriented_development

I have some questions about the source of this report/ research, which claims that density (including examples such as Vancouver's eco-density) "would yield insignificant CO2 reductions."
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Even if 75 percent of all new and replacement housing in America were built at twice the density of current new developments, and those living in the newly constructed housing drove 25 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions from personal travel would decline nationwide by only 8 to 11 percent by 2050, according to the study. If just 25 percent of housing units were developed at such densities and residents drove only 12 percent less as a result, CO2 emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent by 2050.
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I guess the problem is with defining real density as a mere "twice the density of current new developments": if you consider that new developments include suburban greenfield spreads on 1/4 to 1/2 acre for each SFH, then doubling that density really doesn't amount to much.

Further down, the report just makes the case for building more fuel-efficient cars - so maybe that's where the report's agenda originates.

mit_techreview sprawl urbanplanning phil_mckenna density national_academy_of_sciences

Interesting short notice by Adam Stein about California's proposal to "pass legislation that would harmonize regional planning efforts with the state’s overarching goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The most ambitious anti-sprawl legislation in the country, the bill seeks to coordinate housing, transit, and commercial development to reduce the impact of growth on the environment."

Stein reviews this in relation to Robert Bruegmann's "Sprawl: A compact history," which he happens to be in the middle of reading. Some interesting thoughts here on whether or not sprawl can really be mandated away. Also, not mentioned directly, but I can't help but hear Jane Jacobs, too, warning about restrictive overplanning...

sprawl worldchanging urbanplanning california green_strategies robert_bruegmann

Well, well ...an opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen (republished across the CanWest newspaper empire, therefore also in Victoria's Times-Colonist), unsigned, that lays out the tenets of anti-sprawl and pro-urbanist thinking succinctly and favorably. (Except that while the title calls it "suburban sprawl," the author calls it "urban sprawl" in the first paragraph. Odd.)

Of interest for a Canadian perspective is that the article hints at the realities of infrastructure funding in Canada.

sprawl ottawa urbanism cities commentary

"Puget Sound is a funnel. Anything that we do at the top end of the funnel comes out at the bottom end." Sometimes painful reading, this article looks at the effect of bad wastewater runoff management and its deleterious effect on the environment. "Barbie Doll" housing colonies are the worst offenders, not least because old bylaws & regulations haven't kept up (or up to date) with new developments in treatment and approach.

seattle puget_sound sprawl growth planning water run_off

"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist."

For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.

urbanism new_urbanism suburbia sprawl smartgrowth density modernism architecture style city_journal

Fascinating article on how planned "new urbanist" American suburbs are being studied by international delegations (specifically China) for replication in those countries. Kind of scary.... (Blogged this, April 18/08)

suburbia usatoday sprawl planning master_planning suburban_style china

John Hill has an excellent entry on highway noise barriers, those typically uninspired, unattractive, fake brick walls that are supposed to address a particular problem of sprawl, "dispersed living patterns and the high-speed roads that allow access to them" (as he puts it). Mercifully, there are attractive alternatives, ...and alternate solutions: "...the best case for raising the bar on the design of these barriers is to make them part of a building; in other words bring the architecture to the road, don't use the barrier to separate the two." Brilliant!

daily_dose_of_architecture highway_noise john_hill noise_barriers sprawl

Found via Richard Florida's "Creative Class" blog, Leinberger's article builds in part on a story that was reported in The Charlotte Observer a while back. With foreclosures on the rise and houses being abandoned, the absence of any sort of on-site amenities acts like an accelerant toward slum-hood.

atlantic_monthly chris_leinberger planning redevelopment slums sprawl suburbs

This seems kind of apropos in view of Victoria's development in the so-called Western Communities, called "Bear Mountain" (perhaps more appropriately, "bare mountain").

angst anomie sprawl suburban_style suburbs

Fascinating slide show narrated by Kevin Fry of Route 1 (which runs 2000 miles from Maine to Florida), and which is in too many places a godforsaken strip mall. Fry's argument is that these places, built for cars not people, alienate us from any kind of authentic sense of place, and in turn this alienates us from citizenship, which is (and must be) local and specific. Relates to this article: http://tinyurl.com/2hkf25 too. (Slide show link via pricetags)

alienation cars kevin_fry nyt placelessness socialcritique sprawl visual_pollution