This book provides a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary analysis of suburban sprawl development and smart growth alternatives within the contexts of culture, ecology, and politics. It offers a mix of theoretical inquiry, historical analysis, policy critique, and case studies. In addition, each chapter is coupled with featured interviews with leading activists and policymakers working on sprawl issues. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Suburban Sprawl combines historical, political, economic, geographic, and urban planning analysis to provide the most comprehensive overview of why and how urban sprawl occurs. It shows that all previous attempts to pin the blame on one or two causes - "highway building" or "consumer preferences" - totally miss the complex and interwoven character of public policy and private interests in creating today's urban form. The authors have included the detailed analyses of expenditures which show that federal housing subsidies have contributed significantly to sprawl in the post-war period, as well as a comprehensive overview of policies that can be used to reduce sprawl or reduce its negative consequences. This book will inform the growing policy community involved in regionalism and the general urban policy community. It can also be assigned in undergraduate and graduate level classes in urban sociology, geography, urban politics, and urban planning.

This book shows how suburban sprawl is at least partially a consequence of government spending and regulation, and suggests anti-sprawl policies that can make government smaller and/or less intrusive. Thus, the book responds to the widely held view that automobile-dependent suburban development (also known as “suburban sprawl”) is a natural result of the free market and of affluence, and accordingly cannot be altered without massive government regulation.

Suburbia has twisted the American dream into a nightmare. The United States now has the most rapes, assaults, murders, and serial killings per capita, by a wide margin, than any other first-world nation. It’s a Sprawl World After All is the first book to link America’s increase in violence and the corresponding breakdown in society with the post-World War II development of suburban sprawl. Without small towns to bring people together, the unplanned growth of sprawl has left Americans isolated, alienated, and afraid of the strangers that surround them. Suburbia has substituted cars for conversation, malls for main streets, and the artificial community of television for authentic social interaction. This has resulted in dramatically negative impacts on US society, including: • The transformation of America’s community-oriented small-town sensibilities into an isolated society of strangers burdened by isolation, loneliness, and depression • The emergence of a culture of incivility characterized by extreme individualism and a callous disregard for others • Levels of violence so rampant as to be proclaimed “epidemic” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advocating that urgent attention be paid to managing development by emulating the smart growth examples of European cities, the book’s final section offers readers tools to rebuild community in their lives as well as in society at large. It offers practical solutions that can improve everyone’s quality of life. Provocative and thoughtful, It’s a Sprawl World After All also includes a helpful resource listing of organizations committed to making communities more sustainable. Douglas E. Morris is a freelance writer whose 14 years of experience living outside the United States in a number of safe urban areas has given him unique insights into cross-cultural urban comparisons. He has published numerous articles on the topic in the last seven years.

Urban Sprawl is not simply a development that undercuts the quality of life for suburbanites. It has raised alarms across the nation, as fair housing advocates, environmentalists, land use planners, and even many suburban employers who cannot find the workers they need, have recognized that the costs go far beyond aesthetics. Despite the agreement that something needs to be done, there is no consensus on what works. Urban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses assembles leading scholars who analyze the major causes and consequences of urban sprawl and the policy initiatives that are being explored in response to these developments.

There is a wealth of research and literature explaining suburban sprawl and the urgent need to retrofit suburbia. However, until now there has been no single guide that directly explains how to repair typical sprawl elements. The Sprawl Repair Manual demonstrates a step-by-step design process for the re-balancing and re-urbanization of suburbia into more sustainable, economical, energy- and resource-efficient patterns, from the region and the community to the block and the individual building. As Galina Tachieva asserts in this exceptionally useful book, sprawl repair will require a proactive and aggressive approach, focused on design, regulation and incentives. The Sprawl Repair Manual is a much-needed, single-volume reference for fixing sprawl, incorporating changes into the regulatory system, and implementing repairs through incentives and permitting strategies. This manual specifies the expertise that’s needed and details the techniques and algorithms of sprawl repair within the context of reducing the financial and ecological footprint of urban growth. The Sprawl Repair Manual draws on more than two decades of practical experience in the field of repairing and building communities to analyze the current pattern of sprawl development, disassemble it into its elemental components, and present a process for transforming them into human-scale, sustainable elements. The techniques are illustrated both two- and three-dimensionally, providing users with clear methodologies for the sprawl repair interventions, some of which are radical, but all of which will produce positive results.

Must the strip mall and the eight-lane highway define 21st century American life? That is a central question posed by critics of suburban and exurban living in America. Yet despite the ubiquity of the critique, it never sticks-Americans by the scores of millions have willingly moved into sprawling developments over the past few decades. Americans find many of the more substantial criticisms of sprawl easy to ignore because they often come across as snobbish in tone. Yet as Thad Williamson explains, sprawl does create real, measurable social problems. Utilizing a landmark 30,000-person survey, he shows that sprawl fosters civic disengagement, accentuates inequality, and negatively impacts the environment. Yet, while he highlights the deleterious effects of sprawl on civic life in America, he is also evenhanded. He does not dismiss the pastoral, homeowning ideal that is at the root of sprawl, and is sympathetic to the vast numbers of Americans who very clearly prefer it. Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship is not only be the most comprehensive work in print on the subject, it will be the first to offer an empirically rigorous critique of the most popular form of living in America today.

As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize. In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful. The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers a completely new vision of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that "in its immense complexity and constant change, the city-whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawling in suburbia, or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles-is the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind." “Largely missing from this debate [over sprawl] has been a sound and reasoned history of this pattern of living. With Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History, we now have one. What a pleasure it is: well-written, accessible and eager to challenge the current cant about sprawl.”—Joel Kotkin, The Wall Street Journal “There are scores of books offering ‘solutions’ to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book.”—Witold Rybczynski, Slate

Annotation Do you really know what's under that new house you just bought? How about what's underneath the neighbourhood playground? Was the big-box retailer down the street built atop a toxic site?These are just a few of the worrisome scenarios as our cities begin a stealthy relocation of industrial facilities from the inner city to the urban periphery. These are the places Alan Berger has coined "drosscapes," and this is his guide to the previously ignored field of waste landscapes.