Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of The American Dream.

• Author: Davies, Mark S.
• Position: Review

SUBURBAN NATION: THE RISE OF SPRAWL AND THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. By Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. New York: North Point Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 290. $30.

What is suburban "sprawl"? Why is it undesirable? Why do many Americans nevertheless choose to live in sprawl? Do local zoning laws contribute to sprawl? Can democratic institutions discourage it? Legal scholars are beginning to study these urgent and complex questions. This Essay reviews Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, leading architects of the influential New Urbanism or traditional town planning movement.

This Review makes five points about the legal study of sprawl. First, Suburban Nation provides a definition of "sprawl" that the law can use to distinguish between sprawl and better forms of new development. Second, the book describes how the form of the modern suburb has antidemocratic effects on public life. Third, Suburban Nation provides an account of why so many Americans buy houses in sprawl -- motivations that any antisprawl measures must accommodate. Fourth, the book's authors demonstrates that current suburban zoning codes contribute to sprawl. In view of the authors' extensive experience in planning and building new suburbs, legal scholars of sprawl would benefit from attending to the authors' definition of sprawl, their account of its allure and drawbacks, and their explanation of its cause.

Suburban Nation is also relevant to a fifth -- and perhaps the most difficult -- question for legal scholars of sprawl: What is the proper form of a democratic institution capable of discouraging it? The authors of Suburban Nation join the current academic consensus in favor of a unified regional government that, among many other tasks, would be responsible for reducing sprawl. A unified regional government, however, is unwise and unnecessary. As Suburban Nation inadvertently demonstrates, a carefully designed regional transportation board is probably the best form of local government for guiding a metropolitan area's new suburban development.

1. "SPRAWL" VS. "TRADITIONAL TOWNS"

   Any effort to study sprawl must begin with a definition of the term. Surprisingly, the early legal work on sprawl failed to define it. Thus, Part I of this Review calls legal scholars' attention to the definition of sprawl offered by Suburban Nation.

   The authors of Suburban Nation identify the basic components of sprawl: housing subdivisions, shopping centers, office parks, and underfunded public buildings linked together by connector roads feeding into high-speed highways. No "clear center" or mixed use areas exist because "the dominant characteristic of sprawl is that each component is strictly segregated from the others" (p. 5). Thus, the essence of sprawl is the single-family house, "surrounded at close quarters by more of the same" (p. 41). Indeed, sprawl includes "ruthless segregation by minute gradations of income" (p. 41). There is no "five minute walk from the ordinary needs of daily life" (p. 5).

   Another component of sprawl is the office park. "Derived from the modernist architectural vision of the building standing free in the park, the contemporary office park is usually made of boxes in parking lots" (p. 6). Here, the employee during a lunch break "can either eat in the company cafeteria or do what most people do: spend twenty-five minutes out of sixty fighting traffic in order to rush through a meal at a chain restaurant" (p. 31). In sprawl, the town halls, religious centers, and schools "take an altered form: large and infrequent, generally unadorned owing to limited funding, surrounded by parking, and located nowhere in particular" (p. 6). "[T]here are no honorable institutions. Civic buildings are sited like any other land use: behind a parking lot off the collector road" (p. 35).

   The authors contrast the sprawling development with a traditional town plan. Each traditional neighborhood has a "clear center, focused on the common activities of commerce, culture, and governance" (p. 15). A "local resident is rarely more than a five minute walk from the ordinary needs of daily life: living, working, and shopping" (p. 15). The streets are narrow, have parallel parking, and have "relatively continuous walls, whose design calls attention to the space as a whole rather than to individual buildings" (p. 75). The downtown features "mixed" uses. Indeed, a single downtown building may provide housing, office space, and shopping (p. 15). But "it is not a design free-for-all" (p. 16). Instead, "[t]here is an essential discipline regarding two factors: the size of the building and its relationship to the street" (p. 16). Thus, "[l]arge buildings sit in the company of other large buildings, small buildings sit alongside other small buildings, and so on" (p. 17). "[B]uildings are arranged by their physical type more often than by their use" (p. 17). "Parking lots, if any, are hidden at the back." (p. 17). In addition, "traditional neighborhoods devote unique sites to civic buildings, those structures that represent the collective identity and aspirations of the community" (p. 17). Thus, the "top of a hill, the end of a street, the side of a plaza--these would be set aside for the church, the town hall, the library, and other public structures worthy of honor." (1)

   The authors argue that a new traditional town does not harm the urban core (p. 135). "[I]n the right form, suburban-scale growth is a healthy and natural way for cities to develop" (p. 136). They emphasize that "placing transit stops within walking distance of most houses" allows new suburbs to "contribute to the well-being of a city" (p. 139). Further, "a new neighborhood can avoid unduly contributing to sprawl by being of mixed use" (p. 187). For example, a "small corner store does wonders to limit automobile trips out of the development" (p. 187). They also suggest a "neighborhood work center," noting that "[i]deally, every neighborhood should be designed with an even balance of residents and jobs" (p. 189). Because the jobs are "transit-accessible," everyone can access them, and the nearby housing offers the option of avoiding a commute (p. 190). The authors also emphasize that, "to avoid the inefficient hierarchical street pattern of sprawl, in which virtually every trip uses the same few collector roads, the new neighborhood must connect wherever practical to everything around it, even if its neighbors are nothing but single-use pods" (p. 192).

   Perhaps unaware of this definition of sprawl, the early legal scholarship on sprawl has equated sprawl with any new suburban expansion. (2) This is a mistake. Expansion of at least some suburbs is inevitable. But nothing is inevitable about the particular plan and design features that the new expansion will take. If law is to encourage new developments that are not "sprawl," it must distinguish between sprawl and other forms of new suburban development.

   This need for legal scholars to distinguish between types of suburbs is reminiscent of an earlier need for legal scholars to distinguish between types of cities. In his influential article, The City as a Legal Concept, Professor Gerald Frug argued that federal and state laws unduly circumscribe city powers. (3) In response, Professor Briffault emphasized that "in most metropolitan areas many of the entities the law defines as cities are--in social science parlance and lay understanding--suburbs" that have had great success in defending their interests in the law of school finance, land-use regulation, and local government formation and preservation. (4) Subsequently, Frug was persuaded that he had "understated the amount of power that suburbs currently exercise in America." (5) Just as it was a mistake for Frug not to notice that "city" can include both urban and suburban entities, it would be a mistake for legal scholars not to distinguish between sprawl and desirable forms of suburban development. (6)

2. How SPRAWL HARMS PUBLIC LIFE

   Sprawl is a pejorative term. This Part describes the authors' account of how sprawl harms American politics. (7) Although legal scholars studying sprawl generally begin from the assumption that sprawl is undesirable, Suburban Nation provides a careful description of the particular ways that sprawl harms public political life.

   The authors claim that "Americans are splintering into insular factions, each pursuing an increasingly narrow agenda, with nary a thought for the greater good" (p. 59). They suggest that "our changing physical environment may play" a "significant role" in this withdrawal from public life (p. 60). Here, the authors emphasize that "community cannot form in the absence of communal space, without places for people to get together and talk" (p. 60). But "[i]n the absence of walkable public places--streets, squares, and parks, the public realm--people of diverse ages, races, and...