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Figure 2.13
Generic commercial sprawl in the
American city. South Boulevard, Charlotte, NC, 2003.
Every piece of this visual and functional mess is the
result of developers following planning regulations
that focused on the minutiae of individual projects
with no regard for the larger urban whole.
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The litany of problems that accompanies suburban
sprawl, especially its ugliness, the loss of open space,
health issues, environmental pollution and the pres-
sure continually to increase tax rates to fund new com-
munity services comprise the most evident symptoms
of America’s urban tribulations. But many in the devel-
opment community who construct conventional strip
centers and residential subdivisions dismiss these
objections, claiming the continued market success of
low-density spread-out development indicates that it’s
what people want. They reject the criticisms of ugli-
ness as the subjective aesthetics of a snooty middle-
class elite; they cast environmental objections as the
rantings of ‘tree-hugging’ extremists. Nothing, in their
view, outweighs a successful financial return within the
limited 10-year time frame of their development cycle.
From this perspective, success in the marketplace
equates to success in society at large.
For many years the developers’ financial equations
of suburban development went unchallenged, but
more recently they have been subjected to closer
scrutiny. The fiscal impacts of sprawl are now much
better understood in terms of their real costs to soci-
ety and the taxpayer, issues that the development
community has gladly overlooked in its analyses.
This sharper economic sense is one of the factors that
has led to the upsurge of interest in development that
is more sustainable in terms of its longer term envi-
ronmental and fiscal impacts. Generally labelled
Smart Growth, this search for a wiser use of land 
and resources has prompted a slew of publications,
each promoting a similar agenda of environmental
conservation and more compact, space-efficient
development (Benfield et al., 1999; Benfield et al.,
2001; Booth et al., 2002; O’Neill, 2002). An increas-
ing number of professionals and the public realize
our generation is simply passing on to our children
and grandchildren the costs to clean up the civic and
environmental mess our society produces today.
But like many cities in Britain, American urban
areas are plagued by many other dilemmas apart from
suburban sprawl, the solutions to which must be part
of any Smart Growth policy. Both countries suffer
from increasing separation by race and income in
urban areas (and the consequent problems of social
inequity and ghettoization) and on top of this,
American cities still struggle with issues of disinvest-
ment in central cities, the deterioration of sub-
urbs that date from the 1950s and 1960s, and the
erosion of the culture’s built heritage by thoughtless
CHAPTER TWO
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CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL