Status Updates From Sprawl: A Compact History

Learning about anti-sprawl efforts in Portland. Probably the most effective in the United States.

This is key: “the very neighborhood that one individual targets as sprawl is another family’s much loved community. Very few people believe that they themselves live in sprawl. Sprawl is where other people live, particularly people with less taste and good sense than themselves. Much anti-sprawl activism is based on a desire to reform other people’s lives.”

He’s challenging a lot of anti-sprawl assumptions that have been in the air we breathe for years.

The section on 125-26 has a rich summary and critique of mid-century studies of suburbia.

Criticisms of sprawl historically are vague, largely aesthetic, and at least in the first modern period of such, Great Britain in the 1920s, largely driven by class resentment.

The causes of sprawl aren’t anti-urban racism, capitalism, government subsidies, communication and transportation technologies, but rather affluence and democratization giving people privacy, mobility, and choice. Sounds reasonable.

Finished chapter 5, sprawl since the 70s.

Suburbia outside the U.S.: more like the U.S. than assumed.

Decentralization isn’t what or like you think it is.