Planning in The Age of Sprawl - Hamilton County, Ohio

admits to being pro-sprawl—it’s not a nice word! I once was told that sprawl is what a slob
with a big belly and a beer can is doing when he is draped across the sofa watching
wrestling--inferring that anything characterized as sprawling cannot be good. However,
residents of suburban neighborhoods--many oblivious to the fact that “Sprawl-R-Us”--are
great champions of suburban living. Indeed, the suburban neighborhood—with or without
the label of sprawl--is exactly what most suburban residents want. That’s why they live
there! And, that’s been made quite clear to me at many public meetings during discussions
about community values and goals. Many surveys support the claim that low density
settlement is the overwhelming choice for residential living.
Current land use and development practices are defended by many. Supporters of
conventional suburban development (i.e., the predominant suburban character built since
1950) deem the use of the term sprawl to be pejorative. They prefer terms describing
development such as suburban, dispersed, decentralized, discontinuous and multi-centered,
multi-nodal or polycentric. Proponents of the status-quo note that conventional patterns of
development are necessary to economic prosperity, that open space is meant to be enjoyed at
home--not after a long drive outside the growth boundary. They are proponents of an
abundance of privatized open space in the form of front and back yards. In their view, the
net effects of conventional development patterns are overwhelmingly positive, contributing
to economic growth and to the social objective of widespread homeownership—exactly as
envisioned by the 1939 World’s Fair where the most popular exhibition was General
Motor’s “World of Tomorrow”, featuring an enormous model of an auto-utopia called “City
of the Future”. Another social benefit often cited as a positive result of the current suburban
development strategy is “filtering down” or making inner city housing available to lowerincome
people as it is vacated by others moving up and out. Indeed, nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century reformers, who viewed the congestion of the city as a profound evil would
have looked at today’s decentralization or “suburban sprawl” (GM’s “World of Tomorrow”
that we live in today) as an improvement too good to be imagined. 1
The Wells Fargo Bank, in Preserving the American Dream, defends the current development
patterns saying that current suburbia is simply in the early stages of development. Over time
these suburbs will transform into higher density areas supporting developed commercial
economies as well as jobs—a process of dispersal followed by later infill. The theory
resembles the natural growth and evolution of forests (succession of weed, grass, and forest
communities) where early stages are essential but not as attractive or useful as a mature
forest. In their view, the utopic visions of the 1940’s and 1950’s have been achieved—Why
fix what isn’t broke They assert that the traffic consequences of suburban development are
benign since commutes shorten as jobs move to the suburbs to be closer to the labor force.
In their view, consumer preference for low-density, single family homes is so entrenched
that any alternative to the current suburban spatial order will never have anything wider than
a boutique appeal. 1
The Wells Fargo view is reiterated in Jack Nasar’s The Evaluative Image of the City. He
explains that design professionals don’t share the values of the public and don’t deliver those
values in designs and plan: “For more than 60 years, planners and designers have attacked
the suburban landscape. Yet the public around the world continues to evaluate it favorably
as the ideal.”
HCRPC
PLANNING IN THE AGE OF SPRAWL
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