SPRAWL: A Compact History
Robert Bruegmann
University of Chicago Press 2005

Published in the journal 'Science', 2006.

This book focuses on urban sprawl – “low density, scattered, urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land-use planning.” It is a lively book about why our current preoccupation with sprawl is unnecessary and the policy recommendations that have arisen to address it are misguided. His argument as well as the structure of the book can be rehearsed as follows: sprawl has always been with us; various attempts to cast sprawl in a negative light are wrong-headed and belied by the evidence; remedies for sprawl have not produced intended effects; and toying with urbanization patterns created by the collective impact of millions of individual decisions is a risky business. A compelling, wonderfully written little book, it debunks some widely accepted myths about urban development, and for the first time, lays out a cogent argument in defense of sprawl as the largely beneficial expression of deeply held human desires that transcend space and time. As such it is a welcome tonic to pervasive anti-sprawl advocacy, forcing us to think about its received wisdom and underlying assumptions. And because it attacks so many sacred cows, it is destined to be widely read and debated by professional planners and architects, academic urban theorists, geographers and historians, and college students in classrooms throughout the U.S. and beyond.

It is therefore all the more unfortunate then, that so much of the book’s argument is wrong. It avoids key questions of definition, confuses urban form with urban process, skates over large bodies of evidence, and when all else fails reverts to questioning science. These deficiencies are not the result of any lack of due diligence. Indeed, the scope of Bruegmann’s research is often impressive, albeit conducted (as expected from a professor of art history) more in the style of the humanities than as rigorous, quantitative social science. But – just like the ‘anti-sprawl campaigners’ he takes to task – Bruegmann hides behind aggregate and supposedly transhistorical trends, deploys evidence selectively, and claims lack of scientific knowledge in his quest to create a libertarian defense of sprawl and avoid policy remedies. This is bad science, which inevitably means bad public policy solutions.

Where exactly does Bruegmann go wrong? One fatal flaw is his attempt to avoid altogether a big part of the sprawl problem by simply defining it away. Bruegmann correctly argues that categories such as city, suburb and exurb tend to be fluid over time. What one generation decries as sprawl – ‘ticky tacky boxes all the same” – the next may see as a target for historic preservation. But he claims that while in any one time period the latest wave of suburbanization has typically been seen as sprawl, exurbs are different. He concedes that such periurban regions are “increasing much faster in land area that in population as lot sizes continue to rise. By some estimates, over half of the new land used for residential purposes in the United States between 1970 and 2000 was in lots over ten acres, and over 90 percent was in lots of one acre and over” (p.80). But then in an astonishing sleight of hand, he proceeds to ask (p.81) “[I]s exurbia sprawl?” and quickly concludes that the answer is no. What is his evidence? Allowing that most people would call a “subdivision of two-acre ranchettes with mowed front lawns” an example of sprawl, he declares that “an old farmhouse on two acres where the husband commutes to a job in the central city but the family farms the land themselves” as hobby farmers or by contracting the work out, is not. Nor are vast exurban expanses found throughout the northeast and mid-west, filled with McMansions intermingled with rural uses. Moreover there is no reason to be concerned about exurbanization. The land is not needed for agriculture, and if nearby central cities are being eviscerated it is not because their most affluent residents have decamped for the exurbs. Indeed, according to Bruegmann, the exurban rich will save the day, their continued consumption of central city goods and services allowing the city to retain some (albeit poor) residents until – once totally bottomed out and hence attractive to real estate speculators – it undergoes revival and gentrification.

A second misstep is theoretical. Bruegmann conflates urban form with process or dynamics. He argues that something akin to sprawl has characterized urbanization since the days of Ur (along with worries about it and attempts to stop it). In so doing, he hopes to convince us that the outward expansion of cities and declining densities are nothing new. Indeed, the very transhistoricity of sprawl implies that it is a ‘natural’ part of the human condition. Moreover, because of its persistence, sprawl must have important and possibly adaptive benefits for human societies, which we would discard to our peril. But arguing that the expansion of Europe’s medieval cities beyond their fortifications was driven by the same dynamics as post-World War II suburbanization of U.S. cities is decidedly problematic. Not only is the geographic scale of the object under investigation – the ‘city’ – vastly different, but the context and forces driving expansion – external threats, technologies, resource bases, economic and social structures, land tenure patterns, institutions of governance – are profoundly dissimilar. The result is superficial similarity in the evolution of urban form – flattening density gradients – but deep differences in scale and underlying process. Due to economic growth, expanding trade networks, and frequent wars, medieval cities attracted population and eventually, unable to stop urban accretion, often extended their walls and incorporated their faubourgs to maintain military security. The post-World War II U.S. suburban explosion had very different roots, being driven not only by a baby boom and business expansion, but by huge capital surpluses generated by Pax Americana that, having exhausted opportunities for industrial investment, sought alternative outlets in the form of real estate development and massive state infrastructure projects. Thus the argument from history is a ruse that generates heat but little theoretical light.

A third problem is analytic: the selective and/or inappropriate use of evidence. Bruegmann caricatures the mountainous research on the causes of suburbanization and low-density peripheral development, and relies on place-specific information, spatially aggregate data, or ungrounded generalities to dismiss standard explanations for sprawl, wave away concerns about the impacts of sprawl, or debunk proposed remedies. For example, an enormous volume of research shows that white flight from central cities with expanding African American populations helped fuel 20^th century suburbanization, defensive municipal incorporation and exclusionary zoning, simultaneously creating wealth for white homeowners and their children. But the role of race is dismissed out of hand on the grounds that Minneapolis has a small minority population but still sprawls. Federal homeowner deductions have “fueled a great deal of suburban residential construction” but are not implicated in sprawl because they can be used on any property, urban or suburban. This ignores widespread restrictions on public and private mortgage lending for much of the post-World War II period, as well as extensive economic analyses demonstrating that such tax expenditures encourage higher rates of land consumption at the fringe by changing relative costs of housing and transportation. To counter the worry that sprawl is responsible for rapid rural-to-urban land conversion that threatens farmland, Bruegmann (p. 142-3) points to aggregate data suggesting that the total amount of developed land in the U.S. is no more than 5% of total continental land area, allowing us to accommodate the entire population at “suburban densities” within the 65,000 square miles of Wisconsin. But such aggregate data prove little since invariably locale-specific constraints – environmental, socio-economic, infrastructural, or financial – are what make continued sprawl problematic for particular places. Finally, sprawl-busting proposals, such as the Greater London Plan of 1944’s greenbelt, can be debunked without any real data at all. Because the London greenbelt held land out of the market, it drove up urban land prices, forcing people to live “at higher densities than they would have wished or else settle farther out than they otherwise would have done” and thus Bruegmann asserts that the greenbelt may have “accelerated rather than slowed the decentralization and outward sprawl of London” to the benefit those already happy and well-off (p. 177-78).

A fourth problem is that when Bruegmann hits one of the most powerful arguments against sprawl – that it is not environmentally sustainable – he uses a familiar conservative ploy: the science is there yet. This is despite widespread scientific agreement about the relationships between urbanization and energy intensive urban lifestyles on habitat loss and greenhouse gas production. Calling sustainability “warm and fuzzy” (p.148) complaining that it relies on notions of carrying capacity that he argues have been discredited, he places his bets of a technological fix to extend resources as fast as global demand rises and ignores the mounting scientific evidence of ecosystem appropriation by cities. Moreover, he claims that low density sprawl may be more sustainable that other forms of settlement because “[a]t low enough densities, most citizens would probably be able to generate, using wind, water, solar, and geothermal power sources, a great deal of the energy they need on their own land” (p.148-9). But would not such low densities create massive habitat loss? Here Bruegmann reverts to questioning science and ‘how much we really know’: habitat loss and species endangerment may due to urbanization, but “species extinction is still not well understood” and we need more research (p. 149). Similarly, while conceding that human activities are playing a role in global warming, “what can and should be done by whom and at what cost is still very much in dispute” (p.149). And because Brugemann questions how, if at all, sprawling cities and their auto-dependent transportation patterns contribute to global warming, attention to reducing greenhouse gases produced by cities is misdirected.

So, what is to be done? This is the policy question that Bruegmann addresses in the last part of his book. After reviewing successive efforts to contain sprawl, typically catalyzed by periods of rapid economic growth, he concludes that results have been mixed at best. (The exception is Moscow where planners had total control and individual preferences were not part of the equation – an exemplar unlikely to be embraced or replicated.) ‘Smart growth’ policies that characterize anti-sprawl remedies of the 1990s and early 21^st century are no exception, with even the nation’s largest experiment with such approaches – Portland, Oregon – failing to provide a “silver bullet in the fight against sprawl” (p.218). Lack of political will to implement comprehensive policies and unanticipated negative effects of policy interventions, along with Bruegmann’s belief that for so many people, sprawl is good, lead him to be “very wary of any sweeping diagnoses or remedies” (p.223), and suggest a distinctly libertarian, market-driven approach to urban development policy. But because his conclusions both about the genesis of sprawl and its impacts are based on weak science, his policy remedy is similarly weak and unconvincing.

Like Bruegmann, I close by considering southern California – where I live and work, and which I study. Once the capital of sprawl, population growth and immigration, land supply constraints and limits on imported water have together produced an urban region that is at once vast in scale and increasingly dense. And while the benefits accrued along the way should be celebrated, the challenges of sustainability created by a century of sprawl wrought by misguided public policy – concentrated poverty, fiscal disparities and socio-economic polarization, severe problems of pollution and habitat loss – cannot be met by families, businesses, and local governments each trying to maximize their individual welfare. The answer to this challenge is nothing short of concerted collective action – guided by the best social and natural science we can muster.