The case for sprawl.

SPRAWL: A COMPACT HISTORY

By Robert Bruegmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]17.50

Reader beware, there is a cunning tactic in the title: Bruegmann's book is not really about suburbs (though where else does sprawl occur but there?), nor is it about sprawl, a history of. His real subject, about which he writes most passionately, concerns the arguments against suburbs and sprawl. A short list of what not to expect: no pictorial documentation of how suburbs were laid out or constructed; no canonical lineage--Howard to Milton Keynes via Levitt; nor any formal description of how the house types, road layouts or landscapes of suburbia developed. Indeed it is totally unclear by the end of the book what Bruegmann thinks about sprawl or suburbia as an architectural historian. Instead he prefers to take the occupants of sprawl to be rational human actors. As a direct result of this assumption, the book provokes those who promote the compact city, runs an uncomfortably tight tangent to neo-con economic theories and can patronise those who attack sprawl and its causes.

The phenomenal evidence Bruegmann uses is available to all of us who travel the open skies--the view from take-off and landing of the sprawl surrounding airports. His historical evidence is a survey of anti-sprawl arguments through the twentieth century; on top of this lies an eagle-eye for the mistakes of statistics, the common assumptions carried over from one learned paper to another, and to a common human logic that rejects conspiracy theories except from those one agrees with. This can lend a certain piquancy to the writing, as when he introduces an opinion with the telling phrase 'in fact'. In general, however, the clarity of writing and absence of the unlikely adjective or adverb makes the book a pleasure to read. He is tough on ecologists, public transportation supporters, planners, those who want more controls, East-Coast academics and intellectuals (could there be anything worse than those corduroy fools?), critics of capitalism, and anyone who cannot accept that suburbs are where most people want to live.

In that very phrase, 'most people', sits the mote in the eagle's vision, because it is precisely those who are not most people--for example those too poor to escape Katrina--that polity must address. This has not been a major tenet of all post-1945 US governments, but it is basic to Europe. For Bruegmann, liberal thinking has perniciously misdirected many planning premises, but his blind defence of the market leaves him with little rational option than to push aesthetics out of his field of vision--decisions made on this basis when all other rationales fail are, he argues, subjective, by which I take him to mean arbitrary, whimsical, personal and formal and deeply interesting. Some would argue that these are exactly where architectural historians need greatest acuity.

Some questions he has left with me are: Is all sprawl good sprawl? Are there bad suburbs and good suburbs, or should we abandon all hope of planning urban expansion and let the market decide? And finally, what kind of unhistorically informed reasoning would this represent?