As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional
notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of
these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing
far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially
inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence
of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize.
In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking
a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as
old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta
or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. 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.
The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers a completely new vision
of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that "in its immense complexity
and constant change, the city-whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawlingin suburbia,
or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles-is the grandest and most
marvelous work of mankind."
Table of Contents
1. Defining sprawl
2. Early sprawl
3. Sprawl in the interwar boom years
4. Sprawl in the postwar boom years
5. Sprawl since the 1970s
6. The causes of sprawl
7. Early anti-sprawl arguments
8. The first anti-sprawl campaign : Britain in the 1920s
9. The second anti-sprawl campaign : the United States in the postwar years
10. The third anti-sprawl campaign : since the 1970s
11. Early remedies : from anti-blight to anti-sprawl
12. Postwar anti-sprawl remedies
13. Anti-sprawl remedies since the 1970s