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11 Beyond Sprawl and Anti-Sprawl Thad Williamson The widespread acceptance of the term suburban sprawl stands as a major rhetorical victory for critics of the land-use, transportation, and growth patterns characteristic of metropolitan America. As both friends and critics of suburbia have noted, the term sprawl itself has an almost inescapably pejorative connotation (Gordon and Richardson 1997; O’Flaherty 2005). Despite the best efforts of numerous academics to define the term with rigor and precision, what comes to mind first for most people on hearing the term is not some scholar or another’s strategy for defining and measuring sprawl, but rather an image of something unpleasant—a particularly ugly strip mall, a suburban traffic jam, a cookie-cutter development on previously green space. The idea that “sprawl” is a “bad thing” that we should do something about is not a hard sell in the popular press or among the general public. Indeed, the notion that sprawl is vastly inefficient, grossly inequitable, destructive of the environment, hostile to community, and ugly to boot, has frequently been taken by scholars and other observers as a self-evident truth. Some of those claims (suitably refined) indeed can be supported by persuasive empirical evidence. But the overconfidence of sprawl’s critics has left the door open to a persistent counter-critique of conventional anti-sprawl wisdom, a counter-critique that remains a minority view among urban scholars but nonetheless carries quite substantial political significance. This countercritique holds that sprawl is mostly a benign development resulting from America’s growing affluence, and that we should be wary of grand schemes to replace sprawl with the designs of professional planners. It may be tempting to believe that these defenders of sprawl can be safely ignored by respectable scholars, in the same way that mainstream climate scientists now dismiss or simply ignore the tiny handful of professional scientists who reject or question the mainstream consensus about the reality 165 166 Thad Williamson of global climate change. That would be an improper diagnosis, however, for two reasons. First, some of the relevant facts do—at least at a surface level—support the case of defenders of sprawling development. Second, the arguments of sprawl’s defenders are, to a significant degree, value-based arguments —that is, arguments that presume a larger normative framework and a larger sense of what the purpose of political life should be. These arguments are ideological (in the nonpejorative sense), not simply claims about facts. Persuasively answering those pro-sprawl arguments thus requires not simply marshalling relevant data but attending to and engaging with the values and normative frameworks to which the defense of sprawl appeals. This chapter argues that mounting a persuasive critique of sprawling patterns of development in the United States requires explicit attention to and articulation of normative values—that is, the question of what would make for a good and just metropolis. In the course of this argument I challenge three kinds of urban orthodoxies: first, the conventional view that sprawl is obviously and self-evidently irrational and undesirable; second, the counterorthodox view that sprawl is simply the product of consumer preferences and hence unassailable; and third, the view that it is possible to have substantive debates about larger-order policy questions while setting to the side normative concerns. On the contrary, what one thinks about sprawl will largely depend on what purposes one thinks political life in general and metropolitan institutional and spatial arrangements in particular should advance. In the final part of the chapter, I take up the question of what might or should be done about sprawl. Here I argue that libertarian assessments of sprawl make a valid point—serious efforts to reverse sprawl will require challenging market-based land-use decision making in fundamental ways. Altering what is most problematic about sprawl will thus require more fundamental challenges to capitalism than mainstream analyses usually suggest. The Libertarian Defense of Sprawl: Empirical Frameworks For the purposes of this chapter, I define sprawl as a pattern of urban development in which growth is disproportionately channeled into low-density, automobile-oriented developments on the fringe of metropolitan areas. The most eloquent statements of the libertarian defense of sprawl to date can be found in architecture historian Robert Bruegmann’s book Sprawl: A Compact History, as well as in the collected works of policy scholars Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson. Bruegmann as well as Gordon and Richardson characteristically are engaged in (a) making claims about the way “sprawl...

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