SPRAWL The Death and Life of the American Dream
Jerryt Krombeen Landscape Architecture History 2, Sophia Mizouni Master of Landscape Architecture, Boston Architecture College, May 2014
SPRAWL
The Death and Life of the American Dream
Jerryt Krombeen Landscape Architecture History 2, Sophia Mizouni Master of Landscape Architecture, Boston Architecture College, May 2014
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Introduction The century we left behind created for a major part our world today, a century where our world changed drastically. The pace of the physical and cultural change is shocking. Our world changed so fast that I wouldn’t be able to recognize the world my grandfather grew up in. Buildings, transportation, communication, personal interactions, it all changed and internet made globalism, change and exchange possible on a whole new scale. Radical changes, but I wouldn’t say my grandfather experienced a trauma because of all this rapid, but gradual change. Last century the majority of the western world changed from an agricultural based economy to an industrialized, capitalistic economy. This change to another type of economy made the last century a century of expansion, increasing democracy, emancipation, prosperity, decreasing poverty, growth, personal freedom and more equal rights. Indirectly all caused by the industrialization, standardization and vast scale of production. Growing economies created voices for more personal freedom and voices to share wealth and power more equal. The ongoing process of gaining equal rights and sharing wealth is still an ongoing process that echoes forth in our daily life. An echo that started more than a century ago. In this still ongoing industrial and technological revolution we gain things and we lose things, as Walter Benjamin already noticed in the 30’s. With his essay bundle “The 4
Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” he pointed in a very early stage of the mechanization out what could be the consequence of age of mechanization. He wrote about the after-effect of industrialization and the originality of a handcrafted one-of-apiece artwork versus the en-mass produced product. That fact we call some things a product already says enough about the identity of what we made and implies that we made more copies of it. The mechanization and industrialization made us able to have products in larger quantities and with lower production costs per product. This method and economical rules changed the whole world and turned even housing if prefabricated products. Now, eighty years after the publication of Walter Benjamin we can only conclude he was right. The fact he was right is beautifully showcased in the ‘The Toaster Project’ of Thomas Thwaites: ‘For nine months I’ve been trying to make an electric toaster, myself, starting from scratch. Traveling to disused mines around Britain, digging up raw materials, processing and forming them into a hand crafted pastiche of a product sold in Argos for the throwaway price of £3.94. My quest is perhaps absurd, but the contrast in scale between the products we use and the industry that produces them also seems absurd. Massive industrial activity in the pursuit of additional modicums of comfort at lower prices - small trifles, like an evenly crispy piece 5
of toast, that we quickly become accustomed too. However, I like toast, as well as many of the other trappings of 21st Century life. The laboriousness of producing even the most basic material from the ground up exposes the fallacy in a return to some romantic ideal of a pre-industrialised time. But at a moment in time when the effects of industry are no longer trivial in relation to the wider environment, the throwaway toasters of today seem unreasonable. The provenance and the fate of the things we buy is too important to ignore’.
(Source: http://www.di09.rca.ac.uk/thomas-thwaites/the-toasterproject# )
We gained a lot of things with industrialization, but we also lost a lot of knowledge and maybe originality and craftsmanship. Something what the Arts and Crafts Style in the landscape architecture noticed as well. The work of Thomas Thwaites is just an example of how dependent we are of technology and machines. We are not capable to live without anymore of reproduce what machines are making for us. It is maybe the opposite of what Walter Benjamin describes. Are we able to able to copy what
The origin of the Sprawl
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In 1902 Ebenezer Howard published his vision and Utopian ideas in ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’. His work became influential for how cities grew throughout the world. The publication and first projects caused a redistribution of people to suburban conditions, away from the busy city. The main factor that made this suburbanization possible was the train. Trains and expanding railways were making citizens able to travel with more people over longer distances in a shorter amount of time. Populating the countryside with self sustainable, smaller satellite cities became an option to relief the city from overcrowding and pressure. This redistribution of people made cities less dense and created healthier
Another important reason why suburbanization became possible was that a lot of European cities were not longer having compact-citymodels and had to built within a fortified wall. The inventions of new weapons made the old defense walls cities used to have for ages, useless.
living areas for workers and their families. Within reach of the big city, you could enjoy the beneficial of living on the countryside with having the luxury of living in the city.
to the outsides and borders of the cities, was financed with funding from ‘gentlemen of responsible position and undoubted probity and honour”. He founded the Garden Cities Association (later known as the Town and
The Garden Cities of To-morrow was a reaction on the fast urbanization processes in Great Britain, where factories in the cities were attracting large numbers of (unemployed) workers to the cities. The overcrowding and the poor conditions of the housing were causing sanitation and public health issues. The idea of Ebenhezer Howard made a contra movement
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Country Planning Association or TCPA), which created First Garden City, Ltd. in 1899 to create the garden city of Letchworth. The donors who were needed to buy land, would collect interest on their investment if the garden city generated profits through rents or ‘philanthropic land speculation. This financial construction made Howard able to kick start the projects, invest in real estate, buy relatively cheap rural land and create new value with his town planning model. The urban scheme Howard designed showed his ideal blue print for a town. A town that was built up in several city radials, who all had their own functionality. Satellite cities were built in four functional rings and divided in six equal wards. Every ward could provide housing for five to six thousand inhabitants. In order to maintain a certain density, sense of spaciousness and quality of life, the maximum number of inhabitants wouldn’t exceed thirtytwo-thousand inhabitants. The maximum size of a new town was fixed with a 6000 acres. With this concept Howard created a certain density for his new, ideal communities in the rural landscapes around the big cities.
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The towns Howard designed were different from the big cities. He wanted to create small city communities, but instead of vertical stacked functions, he separated city functionalities horizontally in different radial, all representing another zone. The core of the radial city was formed by a public park, surrounded by public functions as a library, post office etc. The ring around this public core was again a public park, a green belt around the town center. The next radials were mainly housing for workers and their families. Small townhouses, built in a row, but all with an own garden. Every house, with garden, was occupied by one single family. The next belt around the housing ring, was meant for factories. A work-landscape on the edge of the town, that was easy accessible for railway transportation to supply and take away the products of the factories. The last ring, around the industrial zone, is the agricultural zone with allotments for farming. It is a last gradient towards the more upscaled agricultural landscape that separates the satellite new town from the big city. Howard’s ideas for suburbanization also reached the relatively young United States. New and growing cities like New York for 9
Architect Frederick L. Ackerman (1878-1950)
Landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891-1954)
Architect Frederick L. Ackerman (1878-1950)
example were dealing with same urbanization issues as London and Manchester. European immigrants who were looking for better and new lives and work created a dense and unsafe environment. Overcrowding made New York an unhealthy place to live in and a unattractive destination. As a new competing metropolis, New York had to do something about this issue in order to brand itself. Paris, London, Vienna already reshaped their cities with the newest architecture and sanitation improvements. One of the first 10
measurements to create a better city life in New York, was the construction of Central Park and Prospect Park. New York City’s need for a great public park was voiced by the poet and editor of the Evening Post (now the New York Post), William Cullen Bryant, and by the first American landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing, who began to publicize the city’s need for a public park in 1844. A public accessible park, similar to Bois de Boulogne in Paris or London’s Hyde Park.
Henry Wright (1878-1936)
Next to the idea for a public park, the garden
The first big similarity is the way that this project
city principles were other new ideas that crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Ideas that could lead to improvement of the workers daily life, with housing and environmental improvement. Ideas that brought new standards in th lives of the lower-income and middle-class. In the fast growing city and rapidly expanding city border, this new way of urbanization was tested with the Sunny Side Gardens project in Queens. The project wasn’t a new town or satellite city as in Great Britain, but a neighborhood that still had some big similarities with the main principles of a garden city. The 77-acre (310,000 m2) project contains 1200 units and froms a low-rise pedestrian-oriented housing environment. Almost half of all housing units that were realized are row houses (535 in total). All the other housing were rental apartments. The Sunny Side Gardens were constructed in different phases between 1924 to 1929. The 17 city blocks form a unique collective, because they all have public accesible private parks. Together they form New York City’s largest private park.
was financed. The City Housing Corporation, the organization that bought the land, sold and rented the Sunny Side Gardens homes. The CHC can be seen as Howard’s ‘gentlemen of responsible position and undoubted probity and honour’. The CHC board was formed by by influential developers from New York like the Alexander Bing. A real-estate developer that made huge profits during the fast urbanization process of New York. Between 1900 and 1910, the city’s population grew from 3,437,000 to 4,767,000, the highest ten-year population gain in U.S. history. Eleanor Roosevelt and Felix Adler, were two other influential philanthropic investors in the CHC board. Realizing housing with just a 5-10% return on the investment. An other big similarity is the way this neighborhood is connected with the big city, Manhattan. The railway, now a metro, runs from Manhattan directly to this neighborhood. Creating the possibility for workers to commute from their house to work. The pedestrian oriented neighborhood was accessible via public transport.
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(Source: http://sunnysidegardens.us/\)
Homebuyers were required to pay 10% of the purchase price as a down payment with monthly payments of $10 per month per room thereafter. Home prices ranged from $8,500 to $13,500 (as a comparison, the median sales price of a home in Manhattan in 1924 was $30,000).
http://affordableownership.org/news/historical-perspective-sunnyside-gardens-queens-ny/
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1926
http://affordableownership.org/news/historical-perspective-sunnyside-gardens-queens-ny/
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The role of urban farming, creating family living, single family housing with gardens in a green environment are some other spatial similarities. When you look on the map, or when you enter Sunny Side Gardens, the amount of green is still contrasting the other developments around this project. The play with volumes, the play with open and closed spaces, in combination with the English looking row housing that architecturally reacts on the spaces, gives you almost the feeling you are walking in England. The walking paths through the neighborhood are guiding you to the compact parks in the backyards of the open building blocks. The translation in form and appearance are quite literally, but the differences can be found in the fact that this project is creating home ownership for lower incomes and middle class. Also the density is different from the density that Howard created. Sunny side gardens is a low and middle high-rise project, but built in a high density. A large number of row houses that encloses small interconnected pocket parks and six story apartment blocks (Phipps Garden Apartments ) are creating more of an in between suburban environment than a suburban density. It is probably the way the garden city concept reacted on the New York context. A context with different financial rules and other demands and needs in terms of density.
(Source: http://sunnysidegardens.us/\)
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context. With the Sunny Side Garden project the bases for a bigger concept was born. The same design team: Marjorie Sewell Cautley (Landscape architect), Clarence S. Stein (Architect), Henry Wright (planner, architect and landscape architect), Architect Frederick L. Ackerman (Architect of Rows of Houses), also designed the Radburn (Bergen County, New Jersey) and The Hillside Homes ( Bronx, NY). Next to the Sunny Side Gardens project you can conclude this team laid down a bases for the American Garden Cities. They created and adapted this new housing style a broad in to another scale. The first design projects were done on a small scale, but the inventiosn they made, lead to the suburbanized United States as we know it know. The team of designers made a big discovery and created a modular and generic neighborhood module that could be produced in systematic way.
The impact of Sunny Side Gardens on New York was of course really small. But the design principles of the Garden City were definitely not. Sunny Side Gardens is designed by a team of influential designers who were translating British Garden City principals to an American 15
Garden City? The Great depression of 1929 resulted in the New Deal, initiated by Franklin D Roosevelt. The measures that were included in the New Deal couldn’t avoid homelessness and unemployment, but with this set of economical tools the road for real estate development, homeownership and job increase was paved. But despite these measures, The Second World War drained the U.S again. Financial and labor resources were brought back to a minimum and The US was focused on the war for five years. The urbanization and growth was reduced to a minimum. When the Second World War was over, veteran soldiers came back to the US and needed a home. A stable life bases after the war, with a family, a car and a job. It was the start of a new urbanization wave. A type and scale of urbanization that even had more impact than the previous waves. The bases for the more upscaled way of urbanism can be found in several reasons. First of all, the systematic way of building made it possible to produce housing units with prefabricated elements that could be assembled on site. Developers could make relatively cheap housing in a short building process. The invention of ‘le plan-libre’ (one of the five points in l’architecture moderne) by Le Corbusier already introduced this way of building in the 1920’s. The ability to have a floor plan with non-load bearing walls and floors by creating a structural system that holds the weight of the building, made the facade free. 16
The building system carries only its skeleton, and each corresponding ceiling. Free plan allows for the ability to create buildings without being limited by the placement of walls for structural support, and enables an architect to have the freedom to design the outside and inside. This development in the buildingtechnology meant that developers created standard housing units, who could be adapted and personalized by the costumer. A house became an assemblage of different standardised products picked by the costumer. The mechanization and scale of production turned housing into products. The factory methodology, small uniform plots and keep people still able to make a house custom made for a reasonable price that fits the income of an average middleincome family, contributed to the success of suburbia. Maybe systematic way of urbanization was maybe the only way to provide enough, affordable housing for all the people who were looking for housing. Sprawl, often composed with some sort of superblock variant, made the American dream possible. The American Dream of having your own, small protected environment for your family. A family-life hand in hand with a career in the city. The single family housing plots were relatively small, but still larger than the plots in The Sunny Side Gardens project. Also the housing itself was larger than the housing in the earlier examples of American Garden 17
City developments. The used floorspace per household grew, while the number of people per household dropped to four family members per household on average. The booming economy of the early sixties increased the number of used square feet per person in a household. This increase also meant that the low rise sprawled out far away from the city. A landscape that was ruled by the rules of cheapness. The cheap way of production, cheap price of the land around the city and the
highway had an essential role to make the sprawl work as a place to live in and still being connected with the place where people work. It formed the completion of the car-city-model and it is not strange that the American society, who relied so heavily on the car, became a car oriented society. New forms of serving people from their cars were invented to let people consume more. Car accessibility and parking space were vital to survive for commercial businesses. A whole new cult around the
cheap price of gas made this type of urbanism possible.
car came up with diners, drive-in cinemas, shopping malls, fast-food, drive-in restaurants etc. The baby boom during the sixties, together with new economical prosperity turned the American society in a family oriented society. Consumerism was based on the needs of this growing group of young families.
The American Garden Cities replaced the public transport system fro cars. The consumer based economy was slowly built around the car. The car was a symbol of personal freedom and created a new freedom transportation. Neighborhoods were getting attached to car system and were forming the lowest hierarchy in this road system. A road system that was made to let fathers commute to their work every morning. The Highway Act of 1957 contributed to a more wide spread car infrastructure on the size of the country. The Highway Act was not only built for the economical reasons for workers, in fact the act was meant for quick army movements via the highways in a possible conflict during the Cols War. It formed the necessary hierarchy on national importance in the in 1929 proposed road network ideas of Clarence Perry. The neighborhood streets, city radials and highways, created a separation in traffic importance and speed to distribute and connect people more efficiently and faster. The 18
There was no need to keep cities compact, because of the fact that people claimed more space for their plots and housing, and didn’t want to live attached to their neighbors anymore. The price of gas kept people mobile and all the daily needs were built around the car. As Pietro Nivola (senior fellow at the Brookings Institution) beautifully describes: “Thanks to scant taxation of gasoline, the price of automotive fuel in the United States is almost a quarter of what it is in Italy. Is it any surprise that Italians would live closer to their urban centers, where they can more easily walk to work or rely on public transportation?�
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Another reason why the American garden Cities were maybe lost in translation is because Americans are different from Europeans. Americans are in some cases Europeans who left Europe, but they are in a way different still. And that is because they left Europe and found a country where they could raise their own establishment, small society, church or religion. This bases of freedom and conquering the frontiers in towards the west-coast of The US, is what made these European immigrant
grow up safe and could play in the garden on the swing. Housing became affordable and expandable with personal attachments and garages. People were able to have what they wanted and just wanted to create a safe environment for their kids. In the way Jean Piaget, social and psychologist, wanted to reform out daily environment to make it ideal to raise kids.
American. It is a valuable bases in the American society that could be found back in the the sprawl and how sprawl developed. Sprawl forms a big mass, but also gives you a slight notice of the equal opportunities for poor and rich to create their own household. This type of ownership, individual freedom is deeply rooted in the American society. It contributed maybe to the fact that row houses were not built any more in a Garden City Movement development.
noun: a situation in which large stores, groups of houses, etc., are built in an area around a city that formerly had few people living in it.
The inventions of the Sunny Side Gardens design team, the American Garden city movement, created a optima forma for creating single-family housing. The neighborhoods ideas from the Radburn Super block, with housing around a cul-de-sac, was copied and pasted around The US. The Super block created a spacious, green environment were people could live their individual family lives together with people in the same lifestyles as theirs. A homogeneous, single family housing and middle-class oriented, suburban landscape was the result. Away from the city were kids could 20
Urban urban sprawl
First known use of urban sprawl: 1956 - Single-use zoning:Â This refers to a situation where commercial, residential, and industrial areas are separated from one another. Consequently, large tracts of land are devoted to a single use and are segregated from one another by open space, infrastructure, or other barriers. - As a result, the places where people live, work, shop, and recreate are far from one another, usually to the extent that walking is not practical, so all these activities generally require an automobile (though a bicycle may also be feasible). - Low-density land use:Â More land, less people in that land. Example: single family homes, as opposed to apartments. Buildings usually have fewer stories and are spaced farther 21
apart by lawns, landscaping, roads or parking lots. Lot sizes are larger, and because more automobiles are used much more land is designated for parking.
non-retail functions: daily use (e.g. video rental, takeout food, laundry services, hairdresser). Low-density, single-story buildings, ample space for parking.
- The impact of low density development in many communities is that developed or “urbanized” land is increasing at a faster rate than the population.
- Shopping malls: single building, parking lot, multiple shops. Recreational shopping. Serve a wider (regional) public. Require higher-order infrastructure such as highway access. Have floorspaces in excess of a million square feet.
- Car-dependent communities (automobile dependency): Highly dependent on automobiles for transportation. Activities: shopping and commuting to work, require the use of a car because they are far away from the housing subdivisions Walking and other methods of transit are not practical because they have few or no sidewalks.
- Fast food chains: Fast food chains are common in suburban areas. Built early in areas with low property values where the population is about to boom and where large traffic is predicted. - Office parks that sprawl out
- Housing subdivisions (villages, towns, and neighborhoods, developments): Large tracts of land consisting of newly-built residences. Incorporate curved roads, cul-de-sacs. Offer few places to enter and exit, causing high traffic. - Strip malls (power centers, retail parks (UK)): Collections of buildings, share a parking lot, built on a high-capacity roadway w/ commercial functions. Wide variety of retail and
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The after-effects, a sprawl legacy Garden Cities became American Garden cities and American Garden Cities became sprawl a suburban spread condition, attached to the city. Howard’s ideals were imported by Americans and started their own life, like the European immigrants themselves. Some of Howard’s values were lost in translation because of the scale of the expansions and the differences in culture and what time, 50 year after the Garden Cities of To-morrow, had to offer. One of these things was the impact of the car in our daily life, consumerism and the cheap production of housing. It changed the impact of the garden cities on America. The growth of cities can even be seen on the scale of the whole country. The vast scale of land eating suburbs created a new middle landscape: Seventy million Americans lived in the nation’s urbanized areas in 1950; these regions covered some 13,000 square miles (33,700 square kilometers). By 1990 the urbansuburban population had more than doubled, yet the area occupied by that population almost quintupled—to more than 60,000 square miles (155,000 square kilometers). Phoenix, Arizona, one of the Sunbelt’s fastest growing communities, has been spreading outward at the rate of an acre an hour. Atlanta, Georgia, another overachiever, boasts a metropolitan area that is already larger than the state of Delaware.
Sprawl is claiming farmland at the rate of 1.2 million acres (10.5 million hectares) a year. Throw in forest and other undeveloped land and, for net annual loss of open space, you’re waving good-bye to more than two million acres (10.8 million hectares). Sprawl keeps a person in the driver’s seat. The suburban family, on average, makes ten car trips a day (keeping in mind that most families have two vehicles). A commuter living an hour’s drive from work annually spends the equivalent of 12 workweeks, or 500 hours, in a car. Traffic delays rack up more than 72 billion dollars in wasted fuel and productivity. So pervasive is sprawl, extremists are using it to justify their acts of ecoterrorism. Last year in suburban New York several houses and a condominium, all newly built and unoccupied, were set afire; earlier, gasoline was used to torch a luxury house for sale in Colorado. By 2025 the United States will be home to nearly 63 million more people than are here today. If current trends prevail, they’re going to need more than 30 million new homes. Most of those homes will be single-family, detached units built beyond the edge of today’s newest suburbs. And most of the families occupying those houses will be in and out of their cars at least ten times a day. (John G. Mitchell, National Geographic)
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‘In just 15 years, between 1982 and 1997, the amount of urban and built-up land in the United States grew by almost 40 percent — two and one-half times faster than the population. More than half of that growth took place recently in the five years between 1992 and 1997’. (Urban sprawl, Miriam Wasserman) Sprawl is still going on, but the pace cities are
Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in
sprawling in has slowed down. Sprawl is not fixed in a certain time or period, but sprawl can be seen mostly as a post-war phenomena in the city development. Nowadays urban sprawl is full of associations: varying from personal to political, economical, historical and social associations. How we see sprawl nowadays has also to do with some changes in our economy, the way we live and how we look towards the future. It seems we finally started realizing that sprawl and the way we built sprawl was not the right answer on all our needs. But by measuring sprawl and doing research to sprawl we can maybe better
religious and community groups.
understand how vital sprawl and the American Dream still is.
neighborhoods. A lot of researchers believe that there is a correlation between the density and livability/ future perspective of sprawl.
“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors.“There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.” But the researchers identified four broad factors that appeared to affect income 26
mobility, including the size and dispersion of the local middle class. All else being equal, upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods.
Regions with larger black populations had lower upward-mobility rates. But the researchers’ analysis suggested that this was not primarily because of their race. Both white and black residents of Atlanta have low upward mobility, for instance. (In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters, David Leonhardt New York Times) One of the main focuses on researching Sprawl is studying the density of some cities and
To give each city a “sprawl index score”, researchers used four primary factors: development density, a measurement of how dense the built environment is; land use mix, an indication of how well different functions are mixed together; activity centering, a measure of the relative density of the city’s downtown 27
area relative to surrounding areas; and street accessibility, taking into account the size of blocks, number of intersections and density of intersections to measure connectivity. The higher this sprawl index score, the more dense a city is, and the better its quality of life is likely to be.
Research (Sprawl Index Score) The Top 10 Most Dense Cities Are: 1. New York City, NY-NJ 203.4) 2. San Francisco, CA (194.3) 3. Atlantic City, NJ (150.4) 4. Santa Barbara/Santa Maria, CA (146.6) 5. Champaign, IL (145.2) 6. Santa Cruz, CA (145.0) 7. Trenton, NJ (144.7) 8. Miami, FL (144.1) 9. Springfield, IL (142.2) 10. Santa Ana/Anaheim, CA (139.9) The Top 10 Most Sprawling Cities Are: 1. Hickory, NC (24.9) 2. Atlanta, GA (41.0) 3. Clarksville, TN-KY (41.5) 4. Prescott, AZ (49.0) 5. Nashville, TN (51.7) 6. Baton Rouge, LA (55.6) 7. Inland Empire, CA (56.2) 8. Greenville, SC (59.0) 9. Augusta, GA-SC (59.2) 10. Kingsport, TN-VA (60.0)
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Another trend highlighted by the lists is a geographic split in the USA: while Miami is the only Southern city to make it onto the list of most dense cities, the list of the most sprawling cities is almost entirely propped up by southern states. The sprawl measured by the report is linked to a number of negative consequences. Sprawl was found to increase peoples’ reliance on cars, reducing the amount of exercise they do and increasing the risks of obesity and diabetes. The large distances from the suburbs to the center of the city mean that poorer people are excluded from opportunity. It was even found that although denser cities have higher costs for property, the cost of travel in sprawling cities more than offsets this, making living costs higher in less dense cities. The researchers found that as Sprawl Index scores improved—that is, as areas became less sprawling—several quality of life factors improved along with them. • People have greater economic opportunity in compact and connected metro areas. • People spend less of their household income on the combined cost of housing and transportation in these areas. • People have a greater number of transportation options available to them. • And people in compact, connected metro areas tend to be safer, healthier and live longer than their peers in more sprawling metro areas. People in more compact, connected metro areas have greater economic mobility. 29
Could metro areas with homes and jobs far apart and limited connections between those areas directly affect the ability of low-income children to get ahead as adults? The researchers compared the 2014 Sprawl Index scores to models of upward economic mobility from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley.6 They examined the probability of a child born to a family in the bottom quintile of the national income distribution reaching the top quintile of the national income distribution by age 30, and whether communities’ index score was correlated with that probability. (Archdaily, reposting ‘2014 Measuring Sprawl Article’) But what kind of needs will these neighborhood for fill in the future? How can we add new functionalities this single-use environment, that is built on the principles of the car? How do we keep neighborhoods like these up-to-date in a rapidly changing world? And is the stock of single family housing still necessary in the future? Does the existence of sprawl mean we can never leave the car? Or is the sprawl, as housing, a product we just throw away after using it? An in that case who is taking its loss with throwing away real-estate and property? Who will pay for this loss and waste of housing? Sprawl maybe only for filled the needs of one or two generations and was based on a quick-win model to keep up the post-war 30
housing demand. The speed and efficiency of production created a cheap built housing stock, that can have a short life. The world is changing faster than ever, and no planner could have foreseen that sprawl in some cases would be outdated so fast. The discussions and opinions about the problems, regeneration, what to do with sprawl are various. The solutions are maybe as various as the regional differences per state in The US. And some parts of the sprawl are more sustainable than others. ‘For many cities, it has meant concentrated poverty and decay at their core. Although some — like Boston — are doing better than they have in years, many are still struggling to revitalize themselves as jobs continue to grow at faster rates in the suburbs. In older suburbs, being sandwiched by new development has brought increased traffic, pollution, and the problems that initially affected inner cities’. (Urban sprawl, Miriam Wasserman) How is the sprawl, suburbia, the middle landscape still connected with the idea of Howard? The idea of satellite cities, connected with public transport, with a set density for 32.000 people max. derided in six equal wards? And after all, is it an Utopia?The American Garden cities are maybe lost in translation. They became maybe victim of the age of the machine and were overrules by the rules of cheapness. There was no need to built cities smarter, denser, not-for-cars-only. Because it was built in a time frame where 31
people believed in the new inventions and the future of their inventions. It for filled the needs of nuclear families, with two kids, two cars, a working father and a mother at home. The main critique on urban sprawl, when it comes to the future value of sprawl could be described in a few themes, who are mostly caused by negative environmental and public health outcomes, with the primary result of increased dependence on automobiles. The descriptions below give a short summarized and generalized description of the types of problems new and future generations are confronted with. Increased pollution and reliance on fossil fuel In the years following World War II, when vehicle ownership was becoming widespread, public health officials recommended the health benefits of suburbs due to soot and industrial fumes in the city center. However, air in modern suburbs is not necessarily cleaner than air in urban neighborhoods. In fact, the most polluted air is on crowded highways, where people in suburbs tend to spend more time. On average, suburban residents generate more per capita pollution and carbon emissions than their urban counterparts because of their increased driving. Increase in traffic and traffic-related fatalities A heavy reliance on automobiles increases traffic throughout the city as well as automobile crashes, pedestrian injuries, and air pollution. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of 32
death for Americans between the ages of five and twenty-four and is the leading accidentrelated cause for all age groups. Residents of more sprawling areas are at greater risk of dying in a car crash. Increased obesity The American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion, have both stated that there is a significant connection between sprawl, obesity, and hypertension. Many urbanists argue that this is due to less walking in sprawl-type developments. Living in a car centered culture forces inhabitants to drive everywhere, thus walking far less than their urban (and generally healthier) counterparts. Decrease in social capital Urban sprawl may be partly responsible for the decline in social capital in the United States. Compact neighborhoods can foster casual social interactions among neighbors, while sprawl creates barriers. Sprawl tends to replace public spaces with private spaces such as fenced-in backyards. Decrease in land and water quantity and quality Due to the larger area consumed by sprawling suburbs compared to urban neighborhoods, more farmland and wildlife habitats are displaced per resident. As forest cover is cleared and covered with impervious surfaces (concrete and asphalt) in the suburbs, rainfall is less effectively absorbed into the ground 33
water aquifers. This threatens both the quality and quantity of water supplies. Sprawl increases water pollution as rain water picks up gasoline, motor oil, heavy metals, and other pollutants in runoff from parking lots and roads. Sprawl fragments the land which increases the risk of invasive species spreading into the remaining forest. Increased infrastructure costs Living in larger, more spread out spaces generally makes public services more expensive. Since car usage becomes endemic and public transport often becomes significantly more expensive, city planners are forced to build large highway and parking infrastructure, which in turn decreases taxable land and revenue, and decreases the desirability of the area adjacent to such structures. Providing services such as water, sewers, and electricity is also more expensive per household in less dense areas. Increased personal transportation costs Residents of low-density areas spend a higher proportion of their income on transportation than residents of high density areas. The RAC estimates that the average cost of operating a car in the UK is £5,000 a year. In comparison, a yearly underground ticket for a suburban commuter in London (where wages are higher than the national average) costs £1,000-1,500. Major cities - per capita petrol use vs. population density
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Neighborhood quality Critics of sprawl maintain that quality of life is eroded by lifestyles promoted by sprawl promotes. Duany and Plater-Zyberk believe that in traditional neighborhoods the nearness of the workplace to retail and restaurant space that provides cafes and convenience stores with daytime customers is an essential component to the successful balance of urban life. Furthermore, they state that the closeness of the workplace to homes also gives people the option of walking or riding a bicycle to work or school and that without this kind of interaction between the different components of life the urban pattern quickly falls apart. (Duany Plater-Zyberk 6, 28). James Howard Kunstler has argued that poor aesthetics in suburban environments make them “places not worth caring about”, and that they lack a sense of history and identity. White flight Some blame suburbs for what they see as a homogeneity of society and culture, leading to sprawling suburban developments of people with similar race, background and socioeconomic status. They claim that segregated and stratified development was institutionalized in the early 1950s and 1960s with the financial industries’ then-legal process of redlining neighborhoods to prevent certain people from entering and residing in affluent districts. Sprawl may have a negative impact on public schools as finances have been pulled out of city cores and diverted to wealthier suburbs. They argue that the residential and social segregation of whites from blacks in the 35
United States creates a socialization process that limits whites’ chances for developing meaningful relationships with blacks and other minorities, and that the segregation experienced by whites from blacks fosters segregated lifestyles and can lead to positive views about themselves and negative views about blacks (http://lewishistoricalsociety.com/wiki2011/) But maybe also the criticism became a little stereotyped and too general. The article below tries to learn us, that we still have to investigate every sprawl-case separately and there is maybe not a such thing as a general sprawl issue. Because if you generalize the problem, you also generalize the solution, and by doing that you are still not creating the diversity the sprawl maybe needs.
interstate-traffic-study-1944
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with poverty and often tinged with racial prejudices — were not among the reasons Maine homebuyers cited for their outward movement. Instead, they reported moving out to escape crowded, noisy, and traffic-congested settings. In fact, traffic congestion itself offers a good example of the confusion that occurs when people equate something with sprawl that is not directly related to the density of
And the association between sprawl and racial segregation cannot be generalized. The tendency of white and middle-class families to leave racially mixed, largely urban school districts is one factor that historically
development. Traffic congestion — together with long commutes — are seen as some of the more damaging consequences of our cardependent, spread-out pattern of development. Commute times and vehicle miles traveled are commonly used as indicators of the sprawl problem. And, measured by that standard, sprawl has worsened considerably. The miles Americans travel in their cars each year have grown even faster than developed land and much, much faster than the population. But, while spread-out development would certainly not be possible without the car, the relationship between expanding cities and
has fueled sprawl. But sprawl can also take place independent of race. In Maine, where the population is largely white, the outward movement of people from the cities has been well documented. In a survey of recent homebuyers conducted by the Maine State Planning Office, 42 percent reported moving out to rural or suburban places, while only 5 percent moved into town settings. Crime or bad schools — issues reported in national surveys, which in some cases are associated
commute times or congestion is not simple. As cities grow, they tend to go from having a single center of concentrated activity downtown to having several smaller nodes, including some outside the city proper. This means that people are often commuting between suburbs, so living outside the central city does not necessarily entail a longer commute. Similarly, living in the city or highdensity suburb doesn’t mean less traffic. It is precisely when suburbs are becoming more 37
populated that traffic congestion becomes an issue. Given the choice of using $100,000 to buy a home in an urban or a village area close to public transportation, work, and shopping or a larger house in an outlying area with longer commutes and more yard space, 74 percent of Vermonters would choose the larger home. These choices, expressed in a survey conducted by the Vermont Forum on Sprawl, are common across the nation. In addition, people cherish safe streets and good schools, which a majority have equated with moving to the suburbs.
music. Sprawl has a cult status and is often associated with the average family life. A family life that is disconnected from the shops, who are concentrated in the shopping malls and working in the city. The opening scene in the animation serie of The Simpsons illustrates well how this typical daily movement of a father is translated to a television show. It shows hows the typical life of a typical average American family. The Simpsons are of course not the only contribution of the cult-status of the sprawl. There are various series and films who take the average suburban street as an environment to display their main-characters in.
(Urban sprawl, Miriam Wasserman)
The baby-boomers, the first generations who grew up in the sprawl, are in their fifties or sixties. The environment that was built for kids is now occupied by an more aged group of people with other needs and other problems. Our zeitgeist and the way we look to our environment has changed and that also gives the sprawl some negative associations. Especially when it comes to the future value of sprawl. New generations have other demands and are maybe not that interested in the real-estate we built in the sprawl as previous generations.
It is maybe good to think in several scenarios and directions to go with American cities who are based on consumerism. Scenarios and directions that fit the place in order to not generalize the problem and maintain or reinforce regional diversity. Maybe Sprawl learned us we have to design custom made plans and that sprawl can’t be the same everywhere. And only for the reason that sprawl is different because of all the different zoning plans and state-laws, there will be diversity. Sprawl is not negative only. It also formed America and shaped its culture. A lot of people grew up in these neighborhoods and have memories there. Sprawl is part of a culture and a culture on its own. The cultstatus began already in the ‘50’s with the diners, drive-in cinema’s and rock and roll 38
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Arcade Fire, The suburbs The album’s lyrical content is inspired by band members Win and William Butler’s upbringing in The Woodlands, Texas, a suburb of Houston. According to Win Butler, the album “is neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs – it’s a letter from the suburbs”.
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In the suburbs I I learned to drive And you told me we'd never survive Grab your mother's keys we're leaving You always seemed so sure That one day we'd be fighting In a suburban war Your part of town against mine I saw you standing on the opposite shore But by the time the first bombs fell We were already bored We were already, already bored Sometimes I can't believe it I'm movin' past the feeling Sometimes I can't believe it I'm movin' past the feeling again Kids wanna be so hard But in my dreams we're still screamin' and runnin' through the yard And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall And all of the houses they build in the seventies finally fall Meant nothin' at all Meant nothin' at all It meant nothin Sometimes I can't believe it I'm movin' past the feeling Sometimes I can't believe it I'm movin' past the feeling and into the night So can you understand Why I want a daughter while I'm still young? I wanna hold her hand And show her some beauty Before this damage is done But if it's too much to ask, it's too much to ask Then send me a son Under the overpass In the parking lot we're still waiting It's already passed So move your feet from hot pavement and into the grass Cause it's already passed It's already, already passed! Sometimes I can't believe it I'm movin' past the feeling Sometimes I can't believe it I'm movin' past the feeling again I'm movin' past the feeling I'm movin' past the feeling In my dreams we're still screamin' We're still screamin' We're still screamin'
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Reconsidering sprawl As a starting designer in 2014 you react on the generation of designers before you and the world as it is now. The places where you lived, your teachers and masters in practice are often an inspiration and decisive for how you see the world. But next to the fact these people and places inspire you, they also contribute to the fact you want to change some things and do things different. The legacy of what generations before you have built and what they left behind, is what we consider as our current world. The difference in how generations before us influenced our habitat and how we want to use it now is an ongoing process of an ongoing contradiction. Our world is in need for updates all the time because of our changing needs, changing problems, new prosperity and new inventions and innovations. The world is more fluid than most of us would believe and our zeitgeist is always just a temporary time frame that makes what we made out-dated or oldfashioned. The same thing counts for how we see our ideals and project our ideals in our spatial planning. Utopias are no utopias because of shifting demands, needs and inventions. But as a planner you need to think in utopias sometimes in order to do your work and create future values. And you can only design with the things you know now. The time fragment with the political and economical values of now. And the human behavior and society as it is now.
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The world is a coherent moving and shifting organism that is reacting and interrelated with all things we do. That is why time is not fixed and why urban sprawl could be out-dated really fast. Our modern world can change so fast, that we even can lose whole cities, because we don’t need or use them anymore. Detroit is a perfect example how a city became just a temporary product of a temporary economical value. A city like Detroit that worked perfectly half a century ago, is now a desolate urban waste lands. It is a process of stim and dross like Lars Lerup describes. Future assignments in the western world will be more and more about regeneration of what we built in our century of economic growth. Redeveloping and adjusting designs for current use. Not only on the level of the house, but also on a vast regional or city-scale. Especially when you look to urban sprawl and the impact of urban sprawl. Rethinking the cities we have is what the profession will be about, unless you work in growing African or Asian Countries. Countries who are going through their century of growth no. With some help from western planners, and the lessons of what we made in the last century, they are maybe making not the same mistakes we made last century. The problem we as designers all the time face is that the build environment is fixed and that the human behavior and needs are shifting all the time. You can call this a mismatch
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in generations, a mismatch of the current living people and the generation of the ‘fixed built environment’. A clash of different ideals, zeitgeists, a mismatch in between the past and the now. A mismatch in between stimm and dross as Lars Lerup describes. Detroit was a stimm half a century ago, and is now a dross. but will maybe be glowing stimm again in 10 years. It is a mismatch in flexible factor as time and economical values and fixed factors as buildings and the built environment.
still be sprawl: working in the new sprawl in the new-economy-countries of regenerating sprawl in the the old, western economies. Sprawl will be a challenge in both ways, and the sprawl we make will be a future challenge for the new generations of designers to come. In the end they have to rethink and reshape our ideas and spatial legacy, as we regenerated the current sprawl.
A mismatch we often solve we regeneration projects, adaptation, demolishing or desertion. I think these three options (and the mix of all these options) are the scenarios for the urban sprawl. In some cases we will reconnect the urban sprawl with our modern needs, in some cases we have to take our loss, and throw sprawl away as a used cup. The age of consumption and extreme growth made unreachable dreams and desires possible for the generations of the previous century because of mass production. The after effect of what this chain reaction of industrial revolutions caused is still going on in Asia and Africa for example. These continents are probably going through the same process as we had here last century. If you as future designer are going to operate in the new and growing economies of this era, or are going to work on the regeneration projects in the old or existing world, you still need to know what happened in that last century. And one of the main tasks for this generation will 44
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Reconsidering sprawl Articles and literture Landscape design, A Cultural and Architectural History, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, p457-468, ISBN-13: 978-0810942530 Urban Sprawl, Thomas J. Nechyba, Randall P. Walsh, 2004
In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters, David Leonhardt, New York Times, 2013 Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs. Jason DeParle, New York Times, 2012
Links: Sprawl
Measuring sprawl, Reid Ewing, Shima Hamidi, Graduate, University of Utah, 2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl
Urban Sprawl in the US: The 10 Worst Offenders, Archdaily 2014
http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-theworlds-population-lived-in-one-city/
Urban Sprawl, Miriam Wasserman, 2001 Urban Sprawl, John G. Mitchell, National Geographic
http://www.archdaily.com/180555/video-urbandensity-benefits/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/ harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs. html?pagewanted=all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radburn http://www.authentichistory.com/1898-1913/2progressivism/1-urban-immigr/CHART-Growth_ of_Major_US_Cities_1860-1900.jpg http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/226756/ urbanism-speak easy-reversing-americansprawl-trend
Cities need Goldilocks housing density – not too high or low, but just right, Lloyd Alter
http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/documents/ measuring-sprawl-2014.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Stein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_L._ Ackerman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_%26_Bing
http://www.urbanismspeakeasy.com/ http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/bigcity/205966/sprawl-hits-wall-texas-nextcalifornia
Issu articles on Sprawl http://issuu.com/irinbreining/docs/sprawl_ repair_manual_-_g._tachieva_ http://issuu.com/katiekingrumford/docs/kkr_ suburbia_final
www.smartgrowthamerica.org Sprawl repair manual, Galina Tachieva, Island Press, 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunnyside_ Gardens,_Queens
Sunny Side Gardens http://sunnysidegardens.us/\
http://issuu.com/jerrytkrombeen/stacks/257947 941f574ed09390f5422d6b306b
http://www.sunnysidegardenapts.com/
Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, January 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/apr/21/garden-citiespowerful-idea-scale-time https://www.bostonfed.org/economic/nerr/ rr2000/q1/wass00_1.htm http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
Is The United States still a land of opportunity? Recent trends in intergenerational mobility, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner 46
http://affordableownership.org/news/historicalperspective-sunnyside-gardens-queens-ny/ http://www.landmarkwatch.org/gardenCity.html http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Q62ydJRVxAo
Lars Lerup http://www.architectmagazine.com/blogs/ postdetails.aspx?BlogId=beyondbuildingsblog& postId=104345 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosscape
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/ in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters. html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&#map-search
http://bingmaps.com/
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SPRAWL
The Death and Life of the American Dream 48