Sprawl for Some

I don’t recall why I never finished reading Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History. Presumably this was because of the standard reason I don’t always finish non-fiction books: I picked up some novel that caught my interest and never looked back. That doesn’t mean that I won’t get around to finishing the book, but my readings are all over the darned place right now. I’m reading annual reports this month, but that’s the job.

Anyway, here’s an article by Prof. Bruegmann about the virtues and decline of sprawl:

But let’s assume for a moment that I’m entirely wrong and that sprawl is terrible. Could we stop it if we wanted to?

The record is not encouraging. The longest-running and best-known experiment was the one undertaken by Britain starting right after World War II. At that time, the British government gave unprecedented powers to planners to remake cities and took the draconian step of nationalizing all development rights to assure that these plans could be implemented. The famous 1944 Greater London plan, for example, envisioned a city bounded by a greenbelt. If there happened to be any excess population that couldn’t be accommodated within the greenbelt, it was supposed to be accommodated in small, self-contained garden cities beyond the belt.

Did the plan work? In one sense it did: The greenbelt is still there, and some people consider that an aesthetic triumph. But the plan certainly did not stop sprawl. As usual, the planners were not able to predict the future with any accuracy. The population grew, household size declined and affluence rose faster than predicted. Development jumped right over the greenbelt–and not into discreet garden cities, because this policy was soon abandoned.

The ultimate result was that much of southeastern England has been urbanized. Moreover, because of the greenbelt, many car trips are longer than they would have been otherwise, contributing to the worst traffic congestion in Europe.

I’m gonna get back to AstraZeneca’s annual shareholder letter now.