sprawl posts, articles, and infographics | Sustainable Cities Collective

Sprawl and EMS Delays

January 31, 2012 by Thomas Lambert
with 48 views

Daniel Nairn's November 2009 post on sprawl and EMS delays cites a paper written in late 2009 by Dr. Matthew Trobridge and some of his colleagues in which they claim that they are the first to find a statistically significant link between sprawl and EMS response delays. In the video link in Mr.... [read more]

Reconciling cities with water scarcity

January 23, 2012 by Kaid Benfield
with 166 views

When you look at the official US drought monitor map, you immediately see that many American cities may be in the wrong places for long-term water sustainability. In particullar, note the presence of “long-term,” severe-to-extreme drought conditions across most of Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and... [read more]

Community Growth: Crisis and Challenge

January 6, 2012 by Jason King
with 130 views

Via Atlantic Cities, an interesting film from 1959 exploring the implications for sprawl... from the National Association of Home Builders and the Urban Land Institute. I particularly like the diagrams of the monocentric city towards polycentric city form in post WWII United States. The solutions include planned unit... [read more]

Rust Belt Cities: to Avoid Demographic Loss, Protect & Strengthen the Core

January 5, 2012 by Kaid Benfield
with 245 views

For some time, I have been on record as believing that the problem with former industrial cities that have lost population isn’t just the changing economy. It’s also a failure to address suburban sprawl. A close look at population data reveals that, while the populations within central cities’ jurisdictional boundaries have declined substantially, their suburbs have actually grown. The result is that, if one defines “city” as the contiguous urbanized area within a metro region, regardless of political boundaries – the definition that matters to the economy and the environment – the shrinkage may vanish or be shown as far less than we think. [read more]

Plan or be Planned? – An Urban Densification Dilemma

January 4, 2012 by This Big City
with 202 views

By Alistair Mackay at Future Cape Town When you fly into Buenos Aires, the city stretches for as far as the eye can see – it’s an unimaginably big sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks, urban squares and neat, rigid avenues that eventually deteriorate into slums and suburbia. It is completely flat, and so European in the... [read more]

Greening Streets: The First Step Towards Fixing Suburbs

December 21, 2011 by Kaid Benfield
with 428 views

We’ve made such a mess of the suburbs we constructed in the last fifty or so years that one wonders whether they can ever be made into something more sustainable. Strip malls, traffic jams, cookie-cutter subdivisions, diminished nature, almost no sense of outdoor community. We all know the drill: there are nice places... [read more]

Silicon Valley, Facing a Housing Crunch & Commuting Nightmare, Decides to Change

December 15, 2011 by Kaid Benfield
with 118 views

California’s Silicon Valley is notoriously jobs-rich and housing-poor. There has been a particularly severe shortage of affordable housing, forcing workers employed in communities such as Mountain View, Los Altos, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara to live far from their workplaces, driving long distances through severe... [read more]

The Fringe Suburb Isn’t Dead- It’s Just Not Breathing

December 12, 2011 by Next American City
with 170 views

It seems like progressive urbanism is starting to sell papers. Two pieces on suburban sprawl, that ever creeping bogey man facing every urban planner under 50, have graced the front pages of the New York Times website over the past three days. I won’t talk about Louise Mozingo’s essay, an excellent piece on the reconceptualization of... [read more]

Why Smart Growth is Important to Land Conservation

December 7, 2011 by Kaid Benfield
with 145 views

Years ago, I was motivated to participate in what became the cause of smart growth, and now for many of us has evolved into the cause of sustainable communities, because of the devastating effect of suburban sprawl on the American landscape. For decades, the amount of developed land in our country has grown much faster than population, in some regions of the country several times faster. In the 25-year period from 1982 to 2007, we lost some 23 million acres of agricultural land - an area the size of Indiana - irretrievably to pavement, malls, and subdivisions, according to the American Farmland Trust. [read more]

7 Trends for Planning Post-Oil Cities

November 29, 2011 by This Big City
with 479 views

Breaking news from COP17 – reducing dependency on oil is critical for tackling climate change. In this post, Robert Bowen of Future Cape Town looks at the Masters Thesis of Allen Rhodes, entitled Planning the Post-Oil City, highlighting the seven trends identified and the opportunities they present for... [read more]

Imagining an Elastic City

November 18, 2011 by the polis blog
with 231 views

Planters and urban gardening tools at Kennedy Greenway in central Boston, the site of the Occupy Boston encampment.Last spring, after attending a panel about urbanism in Mumbai, I wrote a blog post about what I called the "entropic city" — one that is constantly changing and re-imagining itself. “Entropy,” I argued, “is a... [read more]

The Terminology of Place: Atlanta Edition

November 17, 2011 by Kristen Jeffers
with 79 views

This sign has no words, but I think it symbolizes community. Credit: Flickr user The Waving Cat I had the pleasure this week of going to Atlanta for work training. I had the opportunity to fly out of my home airport (Piedmont Triad International), ride the MARTA to and from the airport and hotel and stay in the heart of Midtown at the... [read more]