Reading smart growth: One man’s guide to the literature of sprawl

Acouple of weeks ago my friend Charlene Lee from Alabama’s SmartCoast asked me if I would write a review recommending some good background reading for this week’s conference called “Imagine: A Region with Thriving Mixed Use Cities.”

After saying I would do it, I looked again at the phrase “mixed use cities.” In truth, I couldn’t imagine any other kind of city. After all, you can hardly have only houses or only offices or only shopping centers in a city. The very need to use “mixed use” to describe a city speaks volumes about the distance our society must cover to start building complete neighborhoods, towns and cities again.

For a great introduction to why, and how, we should build communities that are walkable and high in character, and where daily needs are close at hand, you can hardly do better than “Suburban Nation” by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck (Farah, Strauss and Giroux, 2000). Duany and Plater-Zyberk are the husband-and-wife team who designed Seaside, Fla., and went on to help found the New Urbanism school of town planning and urban design. Speck is their former director of town planning.

The authors begin by dissecting the shortcomings of “sprawl” development, their term for the pavement-intensive pattern we’re all familiar with, because it looks the same everywhere it’s built: subdivisions with one exit onto a busy arterial road flanked by parking lots and commercial strips; the rush-hour and Saturday afternoon traffic jams; the throwaway, could-be-anywhere look of it all. They analyze in plain language how and why this system fails when population reaches a certain point.

AL.com