Sprawl

This morning, one of my listservs was aflutter with discussion of a new article by Joel Kotkin, attacking an alleged "war against the suburbs." According to Kotkin, this "war" consisted of Jerry Brown’s efforts to "compel residents to move to city centers." After reading Kotkin’s article, I couldn’t really figure out exactly what Brown was trying to do- and since I don’t live in California, it really isn’t that important to me.

However, it is important to realize that "smart growth" need not be the enemy of suburbs. Here’s why:

For nearly all of my adult life, I have lived in small towns or urban neighborhoods. But for the past two years, I have lived in sprawl. When I moved to Jacksonville two years ago, I moved to Mandarin, a basically suburban neighborhood about nine miles from downtown. As I looked for apartments in 2006, I noticed that in many ways, Mandarin is typical sprawl: our major commercial street (San Jose Boulevard) is as many as eight lanes in some places, and even most apartments are separated from San Jose’s commerce. [See http://atlantaphotos.fotopic.net/c872477.html for my photos of Mandarin and other Jacksonville neighborhoods.] I thought Mandarin would be a typical suburb: homogenously white and upper-middle class.

Today, I turned in my grades for my seminar on "Sprawl and the Law." It occurred to me that some readers of this blog might be academics, and might be interested on how one can teach a course on sprawl.

I began by defining the issue. As I pointed out in an earlier post (at http://www.planetizen.com/node/31063) the term "sprawl" has two common meanings: where we grow (city or suburb) and how we grow (pedestrian-friendly or automobile-dependent). Policies that affect the first type of "sprawl" need not affect the second (and vice versa).