The Road to Sprawl

1. The Road to Sprawl

2. Origins • anti-urban ideologies of Howard, Wright, etc. • streetcar suburbs (e.g. Riverside) • Federally insured (FHA) home loans from 1933 • term was lengthened from 5-10 to 20-30 • Federal Govt. insured lenders in case of foreclosure • Veterans Administration (GI-bill) created no-down payment loans • FAHA: Federally-subsidized highway construction (states ended up paying 10%) • Congress creates a form of corporate welfare under hard lobbying from the “road gang”: oil, car, and tire corporations • Automobile dependency of American society

3. The Post-War House (from 1940s)

4. A new model of the “good life”

5. H. Gans “Levittowners” • Studied residents of 1st mass-produced housing (William Levitt → Levittown, NY and NJ) late 1940s • Middle-class values were being asserted vs. working class and upper middle class • Class conflict was not explicit but was evident in struggles over public services such as fire protection, libraries, and schools (Herbert Gans) • While they were wealthy enough to apply “all-of-the-above” philosophy, their model of community (no taxes, every family for itself) led to an “either/or” philosophy and consequently to class struggle

6. Levitt’s New Urban Dream Peter Bacon Hales: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown.html

7. What kind of community was left behind? (Jane Jacobs) • stable • dense • proprietary attitude toward neighborhood • informal maintenance of order • “eyes on the street” • round-the-clock activity • pedestrian space (sidewalk) • mix of ages and uses • “sidewalk ballet” Photo: New Deal Network, http://newdeal.feri.org/library/sg014.htm

8. The Street as Public Spacenot machine space

9. White Flight (from 1940s)

10. The Mall (from 1950s)

11. A purified realm

12. The Service-Oriented SuburbanOffice Building (from 1970s)

13. The Back Office (from 1980s)

14. Feeling a Bit Paranoid?

15. Gated Communities (from 1990s)

16. classism racism federal policy automobile dependency ageing infrastructure inner-city crime school quality inner-city pollution What’s wrong with this list? The fact that it is a list! Centrifugal Forces

18. Who Suffers from White Flight?

19. Cyclical Relationship

20. Some New Urban Landscapes • Brownfields • Greenfields • Purified Residential Spaces • Machine Spaces • Automobile Graveyards

21. Brownfields

22. Brownfields

23. Greenfields

24. Really Really Green

25. Purified Residential Spaces

27. Machine Spaces

28. Automobile Graveyards

29. Discovery of the 1990s • If everyone wants to live where the rich live, only the really poor will be left in the inner city • This will mean the city has no fiscal resources to address their problems • Could it be that the way address the social problems of the inner city is to quit running away?

30. Remaining Problem • Cities are increasingly based around the use of private, motorized transportation: cars, SUVs, light trucks, vans, motorcycles • Pedestrian spaces are severely degraded • noise • air pollution • lack of access • separation of destinations

31. Cyclical Relationship

32. Much of this comes back to anti-urban ideologies What are our dreams of the “good life”?

33. Selling Anti-Urban Dreams

34. More Dreams …

35. The Role of Urban Imagery

36. Anti-Urban Ideology in Ads

37. Small-Town Nostalgia

38. Confederate Nostalgia

39. Habitat Gain (for us)Habitat Loss (for wild species)

40. Deforestation

41. Exurban Development

42. Exurban Development

43. Living “in” Nature

44. Who Suffers from Exurban Development?

45. Is golfing a way to get in touch with “nature”?

46. Final Thoughts • If everyone wants to live “in nature” the rate of habitat destruction will continue to accelerate • If everyone tries to get away from people who are poorer this amounts to imposing a travel-tax on the poor who must travel farther to access jobs, services, retail, useable public spaces, etc. • Could it be that the way to improve our social lives and the environment is to quit running away from the city and start acting as if we intend to make the city our home?