Sprawl - A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann - Essay Example

The word sprawl itself is densely coded with negative and even pejorative images, ranging from road-raging SUV drivers negotiating the concrete twists-and-turns of the plethora of highways connecting walled, suburban retreats one from the next as they juggle cell phones and daytimers enroute to a too-distant office tower. Passing mile upon mile of homogeneous, and equidistant, suburban enclaves, as well as the ubiquitous strip mall and fast-food outlets, these sprawl commuters will, at the end of the journey, toil for the requisite number of hours only to turn around to fight a similar crowd, with similar emotional and environmental stresses, back home. Within sprawl, proximity gives way to status-vehicles, natural green space to a plethora of parks and lawns, and a comforting sense of cohesion to a sprawling, disconnected, and almost by definition non-communicative environment in which individual families live in virtual isolation despite the nearness of neighbors. In Sprawl: A Compact History (2005), Robert Bruegmann, a distinguished professor of architecture and chair of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, oscillates between two points. The first invites readers to take a moment to reconsider what many critics and social theorists point to as a primary symptom of our culture’s overwhelming decline; at the second, he chastises them for not understanding fully the history of sprawl (which he claims has been with us since primitive man organized shelter around those first faltering attempts at fire, it seems) for not embracing the dynamic potentialities of its place in our postmodern culture. As he states very clearly in his tendentious introductory comments: Because the vast majority of what has been written about sprawl dwells at great length on the problems of sprawl and the benefits of stopping it, I am stressing instead the other side of the coin, that is to say the benefits of sprawl and the problems caused by reform efforts. Although I have tried to be accurate in presenting the story of how cities have sprawled and how reformers have tried to stop this sprawl, one of my goals [in this book] has been to redress to some extent the balance of opinion. My hope is to reach individuals who are concerned with urban issues, worried about the massive growth that they see around them, and willing to suspend judgment long enough to look without prejudice at some of the evidence actually visible on the ground. (11-12) According to Bruegmann’s at times overly simplified reading of this complex settlement pattern, there are two primary causes of modern sprawl as our culture has come to understand it: increased affluence (which makes common sense) and the increasingly dramatic spread of democratic ideals across the globe (which, at first glance, makes less so). To the latter point, Bruegmann’s logic follows something along this line: what we used to define as denizens of the lower-middle or even upper blue-collar class have, over the past decades, become more and more secure both economically and in terms of social status. With the increase in stability, this population has followed the lead of the already-established upper class, heading out in search of privacy, the freedom of space and low-density living, and the quasi-Ovidian promise of the pseudo-bucolic lifestyle. With this wave of outward migration from the cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came the rejection and cultural denigration (followed, inevitably it might seem, by the physical degradation) of the high-density (now seen as crowded) and ethnically diverse “tenement” settlements that have become positioned through the latter half of the former century at the heart of right-wing political fear mongering (urban crime being the most obvious example, followed very closely by the emphasis on the largely urban war on drugs) as well as the equally pervasive and more persuasive critique of community planning and what Bruegmann calls “exurban” development. And, as he goes on to make clear, it is a pattern of critique that has been bent on limiting the democratic freedoms that fueled sprawl in the first place, most notably through at times draconian zoning and bylaw packages, large scale and heavily engineered development projects, and the pressures that are brought to bear on transit infrastructures. It is not surprising, then, that Bruegmann’s thesis is determined, in part, to illuminate in profound ways the elitist (read non-democratic) underpinnings of the various anti-sprawl movements that have emerged in the past one hundred years. As he notes, almost casually by way of marking the parameters of this debate: "Wherever and whenever a new class of people has been able to gain some of the privileges once exclusively enjoyed by an entrenched group, the chorus of complaints has suddenly swelled" (24). And later, he iterates that "to anti-sprawl reformers, sprawl is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally damaging and aesthetically ugly. Anti-sprawl agitation tends to rise during every major period of economic growth -- between the wars in Britain, after World War II in America, and in cities around the globe since the 1980s. Many of the objections have been based on shaky assumptions, often tinged with class bias." In London during the expansiveness of the early 1920s, for instance, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis and the local planner Thomas Sharp wrote and spoke openly against the development of what they saw as aesthetically ill-formed and uncivilized rowhouses in neighborhoods like Merton Park. Although not always spoken in the same breath was their concern with the equally unappealing individuals and families who might take up residence in such housing developments. The opening up of the "crabgrass frontier" of the American suburbs after the Second World War similarly caused anxiety among such Leavis-inspired critics as Lewis Mumford and William H. Whyte, both of whom saw in the aesthetics and ideologies of the tract house developments not so much a marking of the benefits of general prosperity and upward mobility but the apotheosis of 1950s mass conformity. In the 1970s, the now well-established anti-sprawl movement aligned itself with New Age environmentalists, a marriage that introduced more jargon to the litany of complaints initiated primarily upper-middle-class people seeking to keep others from encroaching on their backyards. In each case, those who had already gotten theirs are shown to be motivated by keeping others from doing likewise. Behind the flash and immediate, almost common-sensical appeal of Bruegmann's dismissal of sprawl's modern critics lies some matters of serious concern. For instance, he does nothing to address how various factors besides personal preference coalesced from the 1920s onwards to not only support the sprawl mentality but also to work together in what Bruegmann asserts without hesitation are demonstrably and persistently negative consequences. This lacunae is something that is addressed more eloquently in such a book as journalist’s Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s (1995), which looks, albeit somewhat passively, at the compounding influences of the shifting industrial base and relocations of the post-war era, the practice of racial discrimination in urban centers, and the beau racy that controlled cities since there were cities to control. Part of the problem informing Bruegmann’s argument at this point is his definition and conceptualization of "sprawl" itself, which is benignly defined as the process of decentralization of metropolitan areas has its origins in the period right after World War I in Britain and North America. To a writer of some rhetorical flourish, as Bruegmann argues eloquently, this working definition has been shaped and reshaped to stand in for an eclectic gathering of real and imagined social ills. Sprawl has become synonymous with everything from the generalities of urban decay and air pollution to the pressing emotional issues of social alienation. This reshaping has worked to the advantage of critics, according to Bruegmann, exactly because the term's malleability enables them to appeal to a broad constituency in promoting their ideological agendas. But what Bruegmann fails to anticipate fully is a readers’ awareness that what he claims to be manipulative when deployed by others also holds true for his own argumentation, drawing as it does on a host of logical fallacies not to mention and over-reliance on speculation and like shadowboxes. And whereas he is quick to dismiss other critics' explanations and remedies for sprawl for not taking into consideration the complexity of the urban environment, his own admonition to bring pressure to bear on the unrestrained marketplace is equally reductive. In this sense, his history of sprawl is not so much compact as superficial, seen as a surface effect but never with the eye toward an archaeological depth and complexity that it warrants and deserves. Not surprisingly, many times Bruegmann’s attempts to present a revisionist view of sprawl based on the core libertarian values of privacy, mobility, and choice are themselves the products of some sophisticated rhetorical gamesmanship. Arguing at one point, for instance, that the vast shantytowns on the outskirts of places like Mexico City and Calcutta can and ultimately should be looked at as the thoughtful articulations of a rational self-interest, he deploys with some conviction as a viable counterargument to the view that such settlement patterns are the result of inadequate public resources filtered downwards to those who live in their squalor with the benefits of private ownership and individual "lifestyle" options. Similarly problematic is his call for a thorough and critical reappraisal of the good works of New York City development guru Robert Moses, who has been shown through the luxuries of hindsight to be one of the least-democratically responsive municipal bureaucrats who ever controlled a budget. The very antithesis of everything Bruegmann purports to embrace, Moses channeled billions of dollars in public funds into pet projects with little or no regard for individual choice or privacy concerns of local residents, literally ripping apart whole sections of New York in the process. Recovering much of the groundwork established in Bruegmann’s polemical defence, Ehrenhalt asserts that it is what he calls hyperindividualism" that has caused social breakdown in the United States. Specifically, he argues, that “[t]he worship of choice has brought us a world of restless dissatisfaction, in which nothing we choose seems good enough to be permanent and we are unable to resist the endless pursuit of new selections--in work, in marriage, in front of the television set. The suspicion of authority has meant the erosion of standards of conduct and civility, visible most clearly in schools where teachers who dare to discipline pupils risk a profane response. The repudiation of sin has given us a collection of wrongdoers who insist that they are not responsible for their actions because they have been dealt bad cards in life. When we declare that there are no sinners, we are a step away from deciding that there is no such thing as right and wrong." By now, this sort of critique has become almost commonplace, and the imaginings of licentious baby boomers wantonly pursuing unlimited choice at the expense of community, order, and authority are now almost cliché, outdated in their over simplicity. Sadly, the power of The Lost City derives less from the substantiveness of the research or the logic of the argumentation than from the well-figured rhetoric that shapes this study as well. The three areas studied reflect both the diversity of Chicago in the 1950s and the degree to which the city's diverse peoples shared certain core values, assumptions, and behaviors. To Ehrenhalt, the white, blue-collar ethnics on Chicago's southwest side, the African-Americans in the teeming Bronzeville ghetto on the south side, and the middle-class whites who homesteaded in the tree-bare subdivisions of Elmhurst, fifteen miles west of Chicago’s famed Loop, constitute very distinct aspects of a common belief in the social benefits of order, respect for authority, and faith in community. For the "bungalow people" of St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish on the southwest side, for example, the 1950s was about building a stable, extended family (the new world equivalent of kinship) supported upon a foundations of stable employment in the local factories, about shared pride and support for a well-defined set of local institutions, and, in many ways most importantly, about the dutiful acceptance of the limitations put in place in a patriarchal order seemingly ordained by God. Looking always for syncretism rather than divergences from established schema, Ehrenhalt iterates how these same limitations, with only a shadow of difference, were even more apparent in the Bronzeville area of Chicago, a kind of city-within-a-city that was severely economically pinched, politically squeezed, and socially and culturally constricted. Yet even amid its defining filth and squalor, Bronzeville residents, many of whom had recently migrated from the slavery-tainted traditions of the American South, found reasons to look to the future with hopefulness. For unlike the generally forlorn and desolate situation that have come to define intensely urban areas like Bronzeville today -- several of the poorest and most socially dysfunctional census tracts in the nation are located in the area -- it was in the 1950s a viable community, bustling replete with institutions and individuals that fostered the foundational belief in the power of the individual to change his or her life and who spoke, acted, and lived most passionately with a faithfulness in the possibility, if not the probability, of upward mobility. Hope and possibility were, of course, both the impetus shaping Ehrenhalt’s new middle-class subdivisions of Elmhurst and other Chicago suburbs as well as Bruegmann’s sprawl; yet as both writers seem determined not to acknowledge, hope and possibility were more strategies of escape and evasion, and the body- and soul-wearying treks to the pseudo-bucolic retreats of the ever-expanding suburbs to little to relieve these migratory populations of their sense of limits and restraints, much less transform them into a new community or even new ideological base. If Ehrenhalt suggests that suburbanization of the white bourgeoisie was a necessary precondition for the moral chaos of these postmodern times, his argument, for all of is appeals to ethos and logos, remains insufficient in its explanations. Residents in the new subdivision of Elmhurst, for instance, valorized and promoted authority, order, limits, and conformity, albeit in different ways than did the people living in Bronzeville or in the parish neighborhoods of Tolentine. During the expansive and un-effusive years of the 1950s, there was still a deeply felt consensus about cultural norms, public behaviors, and moral conventions, and most, though certainly not all, middle-class Americans flourished as a result. Cities like Chicago and their sprawling offshoots thrived with safe streets, decent schools, and stable communities. Just as Bruegmann calls for an epistemic shift in our collective approach to the problems of sprawl, Ehrenhalt's main argument is the idea that we could use a lot more 1950s-style rules and maybe even rulers today. To demonstrate this point, readers need to look no further than at the human waste, the hellish schools and streets, and the "unravelled" communities that come to define contemporary Chicago. Like Sprawl, this book is well-crafted, thoroughly researched, and powerfully evocative. Nonetheless, The Lost City remains unconvincing in its romanticization of the virtues of nostalgic communities while downplaying or ignoring altogether the vices of such places. It is particularly difficult to be convinced by Ehrenhalt's key assumptions: that America in the 1990s is drowning in a sea of freedom, and that most Americans, if pressed, would both prefer and be better off with fewer choices, more clear-cut moral and social guidelines, and greater respect for authority, broadly conceived. Indeed, critical readers will have substantive concerns with both Ehrenhalt's assumptions regarding American values and his interpretation of contemporary social history. For starters, moral responsibility is as easily eroded as instilled by power and coercion. Authoritarianism, whether exercised at the federal level or at the local-machine level (as it was practiced in Chicago during the fifties), works against community and involvement in fairly obvious ways, while at the same time this mindset allows individuals to assume that everything that is going wrong with culture is someone else's problem, that the government is taking care of whatever problems, real or imagined, might be eroding these much-celebrated communal values. Moreover, the downward flow of control also makes social organizations less flexible and open. When order is maintained by doling out favors and patronage, new developments and newcomers are inevitably seen in negative terms. Such systems, which must ultimately crush dissent and unauthorized activity or risk being undermined, find it almost impossible to regenerate themselves in new and different situations. Both authors under review here clearly prefer stability over opportunity, and control over freedom. This predilection cause both to misrepresent the causes, effects, and pace of the change that shifted the foundations of postwar America, a country invigorated by a booming economy that enriched most families. Throughout the '50s and '60s, people poured out of cities not because of some newly developed hyperindividualism but because they could finally afford to. The stabilities that both authors’ romanticize are largely constructed artifact of the author's methodologies: both takes snapshots in time rather than following the constantly evolving lives of communities (urban or exurban) over time. Moreover, social transformation is often less linear and certainly less predictable than either insinuates. My own neighborhood in the early and mid-seventies was not so different from what it was in the fifties. It then plummeted sharply in the late seventies and early eighties, but since then has come back strongly and is now becoming increasingly gentrified. On a more abstract level, both books also misrepresent what most of Americans would identify as the quintessence of the cultural experience. Simply put, limits do not square with our cultural imagination that has often, and probably rightfully, seen American individualism has at odds with community. In an age such as ours, one of relatively easy and affordable relocations, geographic proximity will less and less be the main factor in the creation and maintenance of community. Recent and ongoing developments in information technology will continue to allow us to reconfigure our associations so that they will more and more be predicated upon mutual benefit and satisfaction. Life in America through the turn of the century is in many ways disgusting, even degenerate, but we shall have a better chance of addressing contemporary problems once we get over easy nostalgia and acknowledge three basic facts: Things today are merely different, not worse, than they were in the 1950s; each and every era is good and bad in its own way; and there is at times an exorbitant price to pay for what we call "community." Works Cited Bruegmann, Robert. Sprawl: A Compact History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Ehrenhalt, Alan. The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Read More