Sprawling Places (review)

Philosopher David Kolb does more than defend sprawling places. In this book he goes on the offensive: “Planners should seek inspiration from places that are sprawling, fractured, multiple, paratactic, intersecting—from the suburban commercial strip, from the Net, from speeded-up, fragmented, virtual, discontinuous, mobile inhabitations rather than classic piazzas and small towns” (p. 2). Kolb is engaged with the literature of urban theorists, planners, architects, and other critics of sprawling places, and in some regards he is justified in condemning their exaggerated claims of the commodification and meaninglessness of contemporary places. He has no intention of arguing that such places are not as ugly or environmentally damaging as critics have long noted. But he claims that we cannot measure new places using older places as yardsticks: “we have to measure them in terms of their own new forms of connection rather than against classic hierarchical unities” (p. vii).

The book’s title is a little misleading. Kolb is concerned with different kinds of contemporary places, not just sprawling ones, and there is nearly as much discussion of New Urbanist communities and theme parks as there is of typical sprawl. Unfortunately, theme parks are out of place in this book, in part because they are not really sprawling places, nor are they intended to be “authentic,” or “thick,” or “complex”—the adjectives Kolb hopes to affix to sprawling suburbs. He appears to have included theme parks mostly because he wanted to play with his ideas about place in Disneyland and other “themed” environments. But theme parks are fundamentally different than sprawling suburbs, and Kolb’s inclusion of them only dilutes what he might say about suburbia.

Kolb’s goal is to develop “a more useful concept of place” (p. 31), and his thinking revolves around a few key concepts in place theory, including “complexity,” which refers to the density of roles and relations contained by a place, and “thickness,” which refers to the quality of roles found in a place. He argues that suburban sprawl is both more structurally complex and thicker than most critics would allow. What’s more, he seems to suggest that we do not need to change the way we make places so much as change the way we think about them. Reading across disciplines can be trying, but Kolb is a fine writer and he consciously corrals the jargon of his field to increase readability. Although the book is accessible to historians, it may not be all that useful. Real places appear only rarely and briefly, and the places that do appear are often odd examples. (Why use Piazza San Marco in Venice as an example of a traditional, “real” place, for example?) The bulk of the book is theorizing divorced from the building of and living in actual places.

Kolb’s discussion is removed from history, as well. Chapter 6 contains a fleeting history of suburbia, and is potentially the chapter of most interest to historians. But one wonders how deeply Kolb has studied the development of cities and suburbs over time. In the next chapter, he writes about “existing suburbs that cannot be rebuilt” (p. 184), as if suburban places become complete and unalterable. Elsewhere he declares, “Most city encounters are superficial,” which may make urbanites scratch their heads. But then it becomes clear why he could make such a claim, as he describes tourists sitting at cafes. Apparently “urbanism can be tourism,” as Kolb declares, but he does not leave much room for the possibility that people would actually live in urban communities rather than just visit.

Kolb is largely uninterested in the technologies that have been so critical to the creation of contemporary places. Automobiles and six-lane arterial roads with turning lanes do not appear among the places he discusses. He does not support his claim that the internet and cell phones enrich suburban lives. Even though a wonderful graphic graces the cover, the book itself includes no maps or images. Kolb has created a useful, illustrated companion website...