Sprawl

Things are so large in the Vaughan Corporate Centre, an edge city about 20 kilometres northwest of downtown Toronto, that a cross-section of Vancouver's downtown peninsula, from False Creek to Lost Lagoon, could fit within five of its blocks.

There's a street named Colossus, leading to a cineplex of the same name. The overpass and ramps of the adjacent freeways take up an area the size of the West End. They in turn are surrounded by acres of emptiness, just grass and dirt, awaiting more big boxes, more asphalt.

Occasionally, someone familiar with my scholarship asks me: why do you care about walkability and sprawl and cities? Why is this cause more important to you than twenty other worthy causes you might be involved in?

The answer: Freedom. I grew up in a part of Atlanta that, for a carless teenager, was essentially a minimum-security prison. There were no buses or sidewalks, as in many of Atlanta’s suburbs and pseudo-suburbs.  But in my parents' non-neighborhood, unlike in most American suburbs, there were also no lawns to walk on, so if you wanted to walk, you had to walk in the street - not a particularly safe experience in 40 mph traffic.

Last Friday, I was in two different suburban environments in Atlanta. Both are sprawl by any normal definition of the term - car-oriented environments where residential streets are separated from commerce, sidewalks are rare, and densities are low. But the two places are as different as sprawl and new urbanism.