Sprawling Places

by David Kolb

People often bemoan the spread of malls, suburban strips, subdivisions, and other sprawling places in contemporary America. But are these places as bad as critics claim? In Sprawling Places, David Kolb questions widely held assumptions about our built environments.Kolb agrees there is a lot not to like about many contemporary places, but to write them off simply as commodified “nonplaces” does not treat them critically. Too often, Kolb says, aesthetic character and urban authenticity are the focus of critics, when it is more important to understand a place’s complexity and connectedness. Kolb acknowledges that the places around us increasingly have banal exteriors, yet they can be complex and can encourage their inhabitants to use them in multiple, nonlinear ways. Ultimately, Kolb believes human activity within a place is what defines it. Even our most idealized, classical places, he shows, change over the course of history when subjected to new linkages and different flows of activity.

Engaging with the work of such writers and critics as Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, Karsten Harries, and Christian Norberg-Schulz, Kolb seeks to move discussions about sprawl away from the idea that we must “choose between being rooted in the local Black Forest soil or wandering in directionless space.” By increasing our awareness of complexity and other issues, Kolb hopes to broaden and deepen people’s thinking about the contemporary built environment and to encourage better designs in the future.

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 25, 2008

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Kolb argues that suburban sprawl is not as bad as most urban planners think it is. Rather, such sprawl needs to be understood within a new context in which it is recognized for its own form of complexity. Kolb is a philosopher. As such, I found this book a bit heavy on high thinking and a bit more difficult to parse out in terms of practical application. In fact, in many cases, I had trouble really understanding what Kolb was trying to get at. He has an extensive discussion on themed places, which was interesting, but even with his examples, I found it hard to figure out what would constitute a place that is deep but not complex or complex but not deep and so forth.

The final chapter does offer some ways in which the ideas might be put into practical application. This is most easily done in the context of creating new suburbs, which essentially falls within the contours of the ideas set forth by the New Urbanites. One example of new city designs might be to create multiple hubs and to link those hubs to other hubs.

For Kolb, much of what he terms complexity seems to be linking of areas such that "surprise" (as in a surprise encounter) may greet a person on journeying through a city. Too often, of course, sprawl does not offer us that ability, because people end up in their own little caves, but in recognizing the opportunity that even strip malls can offer for such encounters, we may gain a new appreciation for sprawling places.