Many cities, like American waistlines, are expanding.  Outward.  Call it ‘sprawl,’ ‘creep’ or ‘suburbanization.’ Whatever you call it, this spillage is creating greater demand for roads, highways, and cars.  And it’s not the kind of city most of us want to live in. With gas prices what they are, sprawl may not be sustainable, either.

Two findings support this assertion - one brand new from CEOs for Cities; and another that’s a little retro. Let’s start with CEO’s for Cities:

• In Driven to the Brink: How the Gas Price Spike Popped the Housing Bubble and Devalued the Suburbs, Joe Cortright argues that the rise of gas prices put more financial pressure on folks who live in the suburbs, where the housing bubble’s pop has been heard most shrilly.  Mr. Cortright writes, “Although housing prices are in decline almost everywhere, price declines are generally more severe in far-flung suburbs and in metropolitan areas with weak, close-in neighborhoods.” As proof, Cortright demonstrates that housing prices have lost more value in Suburbia than in the city.

Cities: 1; Suburbs: 0

Now let’s go retro…

• In his 1980 book, The Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale writes that at 450 feet, we can distinguish the ‘general outline, clothes, sex, age and gait’ of an approaching person.  This may explain why many of our most popular public spaces are no more than about 450 feet: the Piazza San Marco is a good example.  (The mall in Washington - which is on the scale of a suburban shopping mall’s parking lot - is a bad one.)
  

Stan Vernoy, a reviewer at Amazon.com, writes about The Human Scale: “Sale begins with the simplest possible premise: that all human efforts should be measured and evaluated in terms of how they increase human happiness, comfort, and convenience.”  Riffing on this, it’s simple to see that suburbs increase our distance from each other (isolation), diminish the human scale, cause us to spend more time in traffic (negative impact on happiness) and - as Mr. Cortright argues - cost us a lot in gas.

Cities: 2; Suburbs: 0

Read more: Respect for the Human Scale in Next American City.

 

 

 

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