Urban Sprawl

Definition

Urban sprawl refers to the low-density, automobile-dependent, dispersed pattern of urban development characteristic of postwar American cities and suburbs. In Learning from Las Vegas (1977), Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour reframe sprawl not as chaos but as a "difficult order" with its own logic—organized by movement, communication, and commercial activity rather than traditional urban form. They argue sprawl requires new representational and design tools.

Key Thinkers

• venturi-robert — Analyzed sprawl as valid urban form with its own order
• scott-brown-denise — Studied sprawl's activity patterns and communication systems
• harvey-david — Critical analysis of sprawl as spatial fix for capital
• koolhaas-rem — Embraced sprawl in later work (Junkspace)
• Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck — the anti-sprawl pole: the New Urbanists who blamed "the rise of what they called the 'suburban nation' for the 'decline of the American dream'" (Suburban Nation, 2000; not yet paged — see log)
• Dolores Hayden — the political-economy critique of sprawl and the development industry (2003); her Field Guide to Sprawl (2014) illustrating "clustered world," "privatopia," "boomburg" and "zoomburg" (not yet paged — see log)
• Roger Keil — the assumptions-auditor: the three assumptions underlying the sprawl critique ('undercomplexity'; 'suburbs don't change'; 'suburbanites-are-passive'), the stereotypical images at its base, and the dialectics-of-density-and-sprawl counter-formula (2015)

Related Concepts

• commercial-vernacular — Building type of sprawl
• movement-perception — How sprawl is experienced at speed
• urbanism — Broader category
• neoliberal-metropolis — Political-economic context
• consumerism — Economic driver of sprawl
• junkspace — Related critique
• suburbanism — the reversal the sprawl-critique tradition is measured against: suburbs as "a defining aspect of urbanism," not its failure
• post-suburbia — the post-suburban moment beyond the sprawl/anti-sprawl binary

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas
• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the planning-critical register, via Sert (1944): "I dread the pictures of the 'city of tomorrow' which appear frequently in popular magazines, a 'city' formed of endless suburbs; one small cottage close to the next one and a helicopter in every backyard! … As a whole, suburban trends seem to be favored and little or nothing new is suggested when it comes to the real problem areas or those nearer the center of our cities… In all these halfway approaches suburbanism seems to prevail over urbanism." Sprawl as the condition the civic core (and later Luna's polycentrality) was formulated against — the "loss of identity in sprawling cities" that recentralization was to repair. See polycentrality, metropolitan-hybrids.
• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the critique-tradition audit: "the dominant critique remained the same. The new urbanists in the US bemoaned the legacy of 'urban sprawl' (Duany et al., 2000), blaming the rise of what they called the 'suburban nation' for the 'decline of the American dream' even if their alternative model looked a lot like some English suburbs, while Hayden's more sophisticated critique focused on the political economy of the suburbs and the role of the development industry" (p. 568); Britain's urban renaissance as the greenfield alternative (Urban Task Force 1999); and the reversal: sprawl's edge as growth engine — "the new suburbs… expected to become the drivers or at least the necessary underpinning of neoliberal urban growth" (p. 574) and the call for "forms of suburban urbanism" (p. 576). See suburbanism, post-suburbia.
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the Nordic anti-sprawl motive: Skjettenbyen's dense row-house structure "may be seen as a response to this critique [of the high-rise estates] as well as an avoidance of the North American-style sprawl criticized by Norwegian architects and planners" (pp. 540–541) — sprawl here as the other pole a public planning culture designed against: the tæt-lav formula (density "achieving the same urban-like advantages" with ground access, p. 542) as the anti-sprawl's built programme. Where Cochrane et al. audit the critique-tradition and reverse its economics, Røe shows the critique operating inside a design brief: the avoidance of sprawl and of the high-rise estate as the double negative that produced the dense-low suburb. See taet-lav, satellite-town.
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the myth-critique register and the dialectics verdict: the sprawl critique rests on "a set of very stereotypical images on suburbanization at their base – operating with idealized notions of single-family homes and individualized backyards, automobilized infrastructures and cul-de-sac streetscapes" (p. 585); the three assumptions — "the 'undercomplexity' assumption" ("cookie-cutter suburbs" painting "a very uniform picture of what suburbanization consists of today"), the "'suburbs don't change' assumption," and the "'suburbanites-are-passive' assumption" (pp. 587–588); the travelling-urbanist industry from "the serious (Dunham-Jones and Williamson) to the naïve (Gallagher)" (p. 583); New Urbanism's sprawl-repair gambit and Skaburskis's warning that NU communities "may also increase sprawl by inducing households to leave their high-rise developments" (p. 592); and the dialectical counter-formula — "A dialectics of density and sprawl is the reality of the regional city while the discourse on density pits one against the other in a rather unproductive manner" (p. 586), with the "barbecue effect" as open empirical question (p. 586). Where Cochrane et al. audit the critique's economics, Keil audits its assumptions and refuses its dichotomy. See post-suburban-densification, hyperdensity, real-existing-suburbia.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the practitioner's diagnosis and the reform programme it generated: the postwar break ("planning boards in rural communities were pressured to adopt the low-density 'slow-growth or no-growth' zoning policies that eventually would become quite devastating," p. 32; Levitt's "frills" stripped, garages pulled forward, p. 35); the built symptoms ("excessively wide streets without sidewalks," 36-ft rights-of-way vs prewar 20-ft, pp. 34, 64); the doctrine root (Euclid v. Ambler's separation of uses, "impossible to buy a loaf of bread without… driving for 15 min," p. 59); and the counter-programme — New Urbanism/Smart Growth/TOD/conservation communities as "a return to acknowledged community planning goals… practiced for centuries, and as recently as the 1950s" (p. 58), with the sustainability adjudication refusing the simple verdict ("For every opinion piece or research paper that argues against suburban living, there are others that state the exact opposite," p. 243). Where Keil dismantles the myth's dichotomy, Wentling specifies which sprawl defects are designable (street width, use separation, garage placement) and which are political (lot zoning, approval regimes) (see separation-of-uses, new-urbanism, suburban-governance).
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the term's supersession thesis: "post-metropolitan cityspace has been both stretched out and pinned down to cover a much larger regional scale than ever before… In a process that can no longer be simply described as sprawl" (p. 242); Whyte's 1958 sprawl epigram ("an unnerving lesson in man's infinite capacity to mess up his environment," quoted p. 121) as the critique's classic form; and the historical correction — Hise's dispersed nucleation showing "what has been called uncontrolled suburban sprawl was actually, for the most part, carefully organized and often fairly well designed and planned urban development" (quoted p. 241). The sprawl/anti-sprawl binary is here replaced by the implosion-explosion dialectic: "mass suburbanization… turned into mass regional urbanization" (p. 242). See exopolis, implosion-explosion-dialectic, post-suburbia.
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the sprawl critique's finance-machinery chapter, and the term's causal anatomy: "Endless suburban sprawl was made practical (and for many families was made actually mandatory) through the creation of something the United States lacked until the mid-1930's: a national mortgage market specifically calculated to encourage suburban home building" (p. 308) — with the ideology's twin sources named across the political spectrum (Hoover's "panegyric on the moral virtues of simple cottages, small towns and grass" against Tugwell's Greenbelt program: "go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them," p. 310); the resource-flow inversion ("City people finance the building of suburbs," p. 309; the Brooklyn bank whose "close to home" 70% meant Nassau County, p. 309); the physical accounting — 3,000 acres a day of countryside lost for ten years (p. 219), the New Jersey belt where "of the buildings on the thirty thousand acres of already blighted or already fast-blighting residential areas… half are less than forty years old" (p. 445); and the recursion thesis — sprawl as "yesterday's and day-before-yesterday's suburbs" returning as gray belts: "an immense amount of today's city gray belts was yesterday's dispersion closer to 'nature'" (p. 445). Where Keil audits the critique's assumptions and Wentling its production costs, Jacobs supplies its monetary engine: sprawl as the socially sponsored product of credit policy, not of free choice ("the myth of free choice between cities and suburbs," p. 308). See cataclysmic-money, suburbanism, separation-of-uses.
• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the concept's epochal re-framing and its exit thesis: sprawl's land came from win-win farm sell-offs ("Sprawl, by definition, is not an intensive use of land, but it is more intensive than agriculture, which is why land prices were high enough for farm families to sell their land willingly, even eagerly… Developers and farmers were mutually solving their problems in win-win transactions," p. 146) — made possible by the postagrarian abundance of agricultural production ("3 to 4 percent of a population to produce food for the other 96 percent," p. 146); the interim-stage thesis — "Sprawl can become less wasteful only by being used still more intensively… suburban sprawl will turn out to have been an interim stage, a transition between land in agricultural use and land densely enough occupied to support mass transit, to form functional and inclusive communities, to reduce car dependency, and to alleviate shortages of affordable housing" (p. 147); the pressure mechanism (the retirement bulge and the bursting bubble making sprawl's land "somehow earn it instead," p. 148); owner-driven densification against developer demolition; the NIMBY fairness acknowledgment ("things can be made worse, not better. They often have been, under the banners of good intentions," p. 152); and the regulatory condition — performance codes, not the zoning that created sprawl (pp. 153–157). See densification, performance-codes, vicious-spirals.
• source-notes/qureshi-2018-spatial-therapies

Open Questions

Open Questions

• Is sprawl environmentally sustainable or inherently destructive?
• How does sprawl relate to social inequality and segregation?
• Can sprawl be retrofitted or must it be replaced?
• The sprawl-critique tradition (New Urbanists, Hayden, the Urban Task Force) and the suburbanism reversal (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field) describe the same territory — is "sprawl" the name for a design failure, or for the ordinary condition of contemporary urbanism that design's vocabulary mis-describes?