by Alex Marshall - articles and essays

The Urban Sprawl Articles:

Puerto Rico builds a train in the sky - "Traffic is horrible. Residents tell stories of once ten-minute drives that now take several hours. Buses exist, both public and private, but they are trapped in the same traffic jams as the private cars. Enter the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), a 10.7-mile, $2 billion heavy-rail system scheduled for completion in 2003. Its planners are attempting something extremely difficult: altering a landscape produced by one type of transportation, the highway, by introducing a different type of transportation, an elevated train line. The risk in this type of urban surgery is that the patient will reject the alien transplant. Parts of the line travel through older streetcar suburbs, which have remnants of a traditional urban fabric. But the bulk of the project goes through postwar highway-oriented development, which is the most difficult to adapt to mass transit." Click on link for full article.

Central Carolina Choices - "Even among residents, the joke is: ``Charlotte's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there.'' Or the perhaps apocryphal comment we heard, attributed to a Hornets player: ``You can't do nothing in Charlotte except live.'' Yet with its quieter style, Charlotte has an immense asset - its culture of cooperation and participation. More than in most cities, citizens are expected to take part in civic projects, volunteer on civic boards and committees, even run for office. Not by accident does Charlotte have more Habitat for Humanity houses - nearly 250 - than any other city in America." Click on link for full article.

Eurosprawl - "The wine, separated by region of course, took up one-and-a-half aisles. This nod to French cuisine in this discount supermarket the size of a football field was one of the few indications you were in Lyon, France, and not say, Connecticut. The supermarket anchors the Auchan mall, a low-slung rectangular concrete box that sits off the A43 freeway heading into Lyon. It's a typical mall in most respects, surrounded by parking lots and various European mega-stores like Toys R Us and Ikea." Click on link for full article.

Old Cities vs. New Urbanism - "Krieger championed what might be called Old Urbanism: the health and prosperity of thousands of existing neighborhoods and downtowns, many of which are struggling to retain jobs, residents, and services. Duany championed reinventing the suburbs through New Urbanism. What was the conflict? Simply put, Krieger said encouraging more suburban growth sucked people and resources from the center city. Duany said the suburban expansion was inevitable, and it was better to do it well than to waste energy trying to slow it down." Click on link for full article.

Putting Some City Back In The Suburbs - "Also known as neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism is the architectural and town-planning movement that proposes to cure the ills of contemporary suburban life -- from sterile communities to cookie-cutter architecture to disaffected politics -- by refashioning subdivisions to resemble traditional small towns or big-city neighborhoods. It's an idyllic picture, and one that is immediately appealing to anyone who has spent hours running errands along a crowded, chain store-lined suburban boulevard or lives on a suburban cul-de-sac. There's only one problem: New Urbanism doesn't work." Click on link for full article.

Suburbs In Disguise - "This is not a matter of New Urbanism being right or wrong, but of understanding what is possible and what is not. Cities, even when drawn by a single hand-like Washington or Paris-take shape in the context of larger economic and social forces. Reproducing traditional cities, or saving the ones we have, would require re-creating the conditions that produced them. This may or may not be desirable; in any case, it is a sociological question with real economic consequences, a question that New Urbanism avoids." Click on link for full article.

A Scary Trip to the Suburbs - "The developers' innovation was to realize that you could capture a movie goer for more than the allotted two hours. Rather than just shake them out of popcorn money, you could get a family to drop additional bucks for bumper cars or pinball. Instead of wandering around the mall after a movie, they would wander around here. It was an example of how the suburbs are still on the cutting edge of emerging urban life forms. Love 'em or hate 'em, the suburbs are still the place that new ways of living, working, shopping and recreating are born, driven by the unstable combination of roads, subdivisions and virgin or semi-virgin land." Click on link for full article.

Biking Amid The Cars - "Norfolk and Portsmouth are lousy places to bicycle. This is a tragedy because it should be the opposite. Their older, straighter and narrower streets with clear, right-angle intersections are safer and better for bicycles. A cyclist can mix with traffic on a Colley Avenue in Ghent, or around Olde Towne, without dread. But the same cyclist will eventually come to one of the giant, high-speed highways, like Brambleton Avenue or London Boulevard, that have been ploughed through these cities without much thought. Even crossing one of these roads is difficult, much less biking in them." Click on link for full article.

A More Benevolent Sprawl - "This sales campaign for a new form of sprawl continues in their latest book, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. As befits a work by architects, Suburban Nation is a handsome book. The text is laid out in big type with fat margins. It is an easy read. The 11 chapters take you through the authors' view of suburban sprawl, of its cures and ills, most of which lead to the door of TNDs. The chapters have names like 'What Is Sprawl, and Why?,' 'The House That Sprawl Built,' and 'The American Transportation Mess.' It is quite an effective piece of propaganda. And, like most effective propaganda, it is deeply misleading." Click on link for full article.

How Urban Should Your City Be? - "The words “urban” and “suburban” are irritatingly vague, and used as both pejorative and praise. To some, “urban” is still a code word for minorities and crime. To others, it means sophistication and a willingness to embrace rather than avoid, public rather than private, a street-based life. “Suburban” can mean narrow, isolating and sexless, or it can mean families, space and nature." Click on link for full article.