Sprawl: A Compact History (review)

The myriad causes and consequences of urban sprawl have compelled volumes of research and commentary. Robert Bruegmann's new book, Sprawl: A Compact History, attempts to both summarize and critique much of this literature. Sitting squarely in the anti-antisprawl camp, the book joins a growing contingent of other works that argue that the notion of sprawl hides as much about metropolitan life as it reveals. In many respects, the history of sprawl can be described as a result of changing technologies. Before motorized transit, cities were largely bound by human walking distance. The rise of electric streetcars in the late nineteenth century and the introduction of automobiles in the twentieth steadily transformed this landscape, spreading the city into a vast metropolitan complex. The same effect can be ascribed to other kinds of infrastructure—water delivery and sewage treatment, for example. As technologies changed, so changed the extent to which the landscape could be developed.

Yet the relationship of technological change to social and economic conditions is not exactly straightforward. Sprawling development patterns are perhaps better described as an expression of a combination of individual preference, market forces, public policy, and technology. Bruegmann purports to add to this discussion, emphasizing the idea that a disdain for the middle class has animated most antisprawl researchers and activists (he cites Lewis Mumford and Peter Blake as examples), despite the fact that certain indicators (such as household income and housing affordability) suggest that sprawl has contributed profoundly to the expanded social mobility of the middle class. Though Bruegmann acknowledges the complexity of this discussion, he follows through insufficiently. While he puts a portion of the existing literature concerned with urban sprawl into a pleasant narrative, describing who said what and when, he turns again and again to a weak cultural argument which holds that sprawl has become universally reviled because it is anathema to the collective taste of elite critics.

There are at least three major problems with the book that derive from this assertion. The first is Bruegmann's reflexive definition of sprawl as urban development "without systematic large-scale or regional public land use planning" (p. 18). Though he offers this volume as a correction to the literature concerned with the externalities of sprawl, to say development is unplanned suggests that city building is the work of a collection of individual actors who pursue their own ends irrespective of political and social norms or institutions. Yet, as detailed metropolitan case studies such as Robert Self's American Babylon (2003) have begun to show, events in urban regions that might seem disconnected are actually different facets of the same process which results in carefully planned metropolitan landscapes. The second problem is the looseness with which Sprawl marshals evidence. Bruegmann muses at the beginning of the book about the unsystematic character of his methodology, noting that a "great deal of my research has consisted of going out and looking around" (p. 9). Bird's-eye observations of landscapes from an airplane approaching New York or New Delhi ("I would make sure that I had a window seat and a daytime flight so I could see and photograph the urban built environment from the air as the plane took off or landed" [p. 9]) are no substitute for time in the archives.

The third problem is the way the author sweeps aside any sustained discussion of the power and privilege that have structured sprawl. The legacy of planned inequity is lost amid an attempt to demonstrate that sprawl is neither uniquely American nor an outcome closely connected to race and class. Bruegmann instead suggests that it is the increase in residential choices available to the middle class that drives critics of sprawl to their rage: "Many members of cultural elites are not interested in hearing about the benefits of increased choice for the population at large because they believe that ordinary citizens, given a choice, will usually make the wrong one" (p. 111). Choice is important to understanding how metropolitan regions are formed, but it...