People love living in the suburbs and have been moving to them and away from the central cities since cities began, as the book reviewed here makes clear, but this reviewer feels it’s really about the transportation policies.
Sometimes the obvious is true, (yards, quiet, safety) even if one doesn’t agree with the policy consequences.
An excerpt.
TRANSPORTATION COLUMN ALEX MARSHALL
Soft on Sprawl
A popular planning book praises sprawl and ignores the mess left by misguided transportation policies.
Planning books rarely make the leap from Olympian hardback to more plebeian (and profitable) paperback because, well, most people don’t read planning books. So it’s news that Robert Bruegmann’s “Sprawl: A Compact History” will come out in paperback in October.
It’s easy to see why this book caught on: It is highly readable. The author, an art historian from Chicago, takes us on a journey around the world and shows us different types of sprawl in places such as Germany, Italy, India and Thailand. He also gives a short history of large-scale planning efforts, such as the Garden Cities movements and development in post-war London.
What makes the book dismaying, however, is that Bruegmann is essentially wrong in his overall thesis, which is that sprawl is mostly a product of people buying what they want and therefore a good thing. In Bruegmann’s view, sprawl has given the middle class the type of large homes that only the aristocracy once enjoyed. Side effects such as loss of open space or traffic congestion are explained away, and sprawl critics are called cultural elitists.
While praising sprawl as a populist triumph, Bruegmann discounts other explanations for sprawl, such as government-built highways and transportation spending and policies. That’s what most concerns me.
