but there's a difference between choosing to live in the suburbs because you have the cash and want to buy a home vs. living there because you don't have a car and public transportation isn't efficient. i do know a fair amount of carless people who live on the eastside so that they can walk to their tech jobs 'cause it would take them 1-1.5 hours to do the same commute by bus

What bugs me about the modern suburb isn't the sprawl so much as that it is actively hostile to walking anywhere. There are no sidewalks, going anywhere means walking over highway overpasses, or next to busy streets.

This is a big change from prior suburbs. I grew up in DC, and the area was a suburb (single family homes, with gardens etc), but it was a suburb of the 1900's. It had sidewalks, and crosswalks, and it was laid out on a grid instead of the typical housing development spaghetti that you get nowdays.

Well I suppose Chevy Chase DC isn't such a great example because it was actually planned by Olmstead and didn't exactly evolve like that.

I read The Geography of Nowhere and I liked how he dissected just what it was about the modern suburb that made them so sterile and soulless. If you can ignore his rants about automobiles its a good book to read about urban planning etc.

What I find interesting is that in the late 80s people were proclaiming the death of american cities...only to find that the middle/upper middle class couldn't wait to go back to the cities when the crime rate fell. Nowdays all you hear about is gentrification and the poor being forced out.

I hope no one read this article and took it too seriously.

I meant the book, not that article, by the way, but...

I am fundamentally annoyed with any "research" that anthropomorphises cities and suggests that, throughout time, all cities not only demonstrate these ideas but that cities follow these cycles, exhibit certain qualities, etc. despite the economic or political climate of a city. Even if it's just a comparison for the sake of comparison, equating ancient Chinese sprawl or Victorian England sprawl or any other age or any other climate's city's sprawl to American sprawl is just silly. Just because people liked to have big estates outside of London away from the poor working class doesn't mean they were creating sprawl.

I'm sure these guys are much smarter than me, but the guy who came up with new urbanism was a smart guy and the only thing he accomplished was a brand new form of luxury communities. Smart is analogous to good in urban geography, not by a long shot.

I don't deny that sprawl is here to stay and that other countries are beginning to show the same sort of thing, but I would argue that not only is it not part of a city's life cycle, there is not city life cycle to begin with. I do agree with the concept that sprawl is less the result of legislation, zoning, etc, etc and more the result of the individual, but all that statement does is legitimize anti-sprawl people who attack people for making the choice to live outside of a city when that's a perfectly acceptable and perfectly reasonable decision to make. I believe more exurb-dwelling people accept the trade-off between land value, privacy, etc and drive-time, services accessibility, etc than businesses and anti-sprawl people tend to think.

But, that's the thing: I think this whole anti-sprawl movement is based on a definition of sprawl that most people would disagree with. I find it interesting to that the author claims European cities are become more suburban, but is that because it's a natural cycle or is it because American-based economic activity is creeping into Europeans' lifestyles? If suburbanization and exurbanization and all the sprawl that comes along with it were a natural process of city life cycles, then why is it that Las Vegas and Los Angeles and Denver and Salt Lake City all experienced it after less than 150 years of existence while Paris and London and Frankfort and wherever didn't have this problem until recently?

I don't think cities necessarily spread when they grow. I can think of many examples where that's not true. Where cities contract, where they die, where they never experience anything resembling sprawl, even in America.

I'm not entirely crabby about this, either, it's just a case where both sides of an argument pretend there's no middle ground. Anti-sprawl people are obnoxious because they the basis of their argument is decidedly anti-choice and based on fundamentals they don't even honor themselves. On the other hand, pro-sprawl (or sprawl is not a problem people), like Bruegmann seems to be, base their arguments on the idea that sprawl is a natural process cities undergo while they grow--see look the Romans had sprawl!-- and totally discount the extent to which today's sprawl, American sprawl, is nothing like people have seen in other cities on other continents in other times. This quote, from his own site: "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." That sort of tells me all I need to know about his position, not entirely unlike the position of millions of supercapitalists and oil executives and on and on who don't see problems if they don't have to provide part of the solution.

The weird thing is that he's an art history professor.

It is a bit weird when sprawl has become so evolved that it now encompasses some areas as far as 150 miles around London because transit connections are so good.

What is the deal, anyway, with Seattle and bad mass transit? Even conservative strongholds like Houston and Salt Lake City have light rail.