Everything You Know About Sprawl Is Wrong
…I guess that depends on what you know about sprawl.
The group I go to lunch with likes to engage in amateur urban planning from time to time. We talk about how terrible the public transportation here is, and how wonderful it is in D.C., New York, San Francisco, London, and all of Europe.
Why is it so great in these places and not in Atlanta? Low population density! Effective public transportation requires that the train and bus lines actually go where you need them to go. In a town being choked by sprawl like Atlanta, homes and jobs are too spread out across the piedmont; only a small fraction of the area is close to a transit station. Damn sprawl, we often conclude. If only we lived in one of those European cities where you can walk to everything…
Today, however, I read an article in Salon (via BLDGBLOG) by Witold Rybczynski about Robert Bruegman’s book Sprawl: A Compact History. According to Bruegman, this whole sprawl thing — something I think we all assume is unique to the United States — really isn’t a recent phenomenon at all. The trend of moving out of the city proper and into the suburbs has been going on for centuries, even in Europe. London, Paris, Barcelona — all have booming suburbs. Rybczynski paraphrases:
Despite some of the most stringent anti-sprawl regulations in the world and high gas prices, the population of the City of Paris has declined by almost a third since 1921, while its suburbs have grown. Over the last 15 years, the city of Milan has lost about 600,000 people to its metropolitan fringes, while Barcelona, considered by many a model compact city, has developed extensive suburbs and has experienced the largest population loss of any European city in the last 25 years. Greater London, too, continues to sprawl, resulting in a population density of 12,000 persons per square mile, about half that of New York City.
Bruegman contents, however, that this isn’t to bring such fair cities down to our level, if you will, but rather to point out that sprawl affects all cities, and that it can’t possibly be a result of low gas prices, zoning policy, and so on. That doesn’t excuse poor planning of sprawl and cookie cutter subdivisions that now litter the suburbs (and are even being jammed into places in-town), but perhaps it’s unrealistic of us to expect that everybody should live inside the perimeter in a string factory loft.
As time passes and Atlanta grows, I expect that in-town areas will continue to be re-developed into higher density residential. There may be an ebb and flow of population as areas come in and out of fashion, but in general the city proper will continue to grow in density, just as the traffic will. And we will continue to lament the lack of romantic public transportation over chips and salsa at El Torero.