Sprawl: A Compact History
by Robert Bruegmann
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert BruegmannEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-11-01
ISBN: 0226076911
Number of pages: 306
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Reviews of Sprawl: A Compact History
Book Review: A historian without a sense of history
Summary: 1 Stars
I picked up this book because I am studying urbanization and am very interested in historical perspectives on sprawl. Bruegmann describes himself as a historian but I have rarely read a historian treating his subject so superficially. Sprawl has been around as long as there were cities, so goes the author's mantra. Even if that were true, it would say nothing about its desirability. But a historian of cities should know better than basing arguments on superficial parallels between historically very distinct phenomena and processes. The Roman country villas that the author points to as an early example of sprawl were actually agricultural estates employing hundreds of slaves. These villas had little in common with modern commuter suburbs (the slaves certainly didn't commute to Rome!) and should be classified as rural, not urban. That is just one example (*) of Bruegmann's sloppiness and frankly the fact that this book gets credit as a work of scholarship says much about how low our academic standards have fallen in general. The author confesses with refreshing candor: "I will be the first to admit that my method of research by looking [out of airplane windows] has been far from comprehensive, and the result will probably seem haphazard to many readers..." (p. 9) "Nor do I claim that this book represents an attempt be (sic!) even-handed in treatment." (p. 11) Thanks for nothing!
Bruegmann claims that European cities sprawl just as much as those in the US. My recommendation is, start up Google Earth and look for yourself. Observe how cities in central Europe generally have clearly defined boundaries whereas American cities go on and on. Also look at smaller cities and towns, they are often more compact and have more lively downtowns than much bigger US cities. Bruegmann does admit that European cities like Munich or Hamburg look different than American cities but plays down the obvious differences by claiming, e.g. that Hamburg has a lower density than Los Angeles. "In fact, if sprawl is defined as scattered, discontinuous development, Hamburg could be called much more sprawling than Los Angeles." What Bruegmann doesn't mention, and maybe doesn't know because he hasn't done the research, is that the City-State of Hamburg, which is 755 km2 in size, comprises 313km2 of open space, including 192km2 of agricultural use, 44km2 of forest, and 61km2 of open water (source: UGRDL, ugrdl.de/ugrdl_analyse_2008.pdf). The average density is relatively low only because Bruegmann calculated the gross density (a mistake that he himself accuses his opponents of elsewhere in the book) and overlooked the fact that the City-State has its own agricultural hinterland, which is rarely if at all the case for contemporary US cities. Had Bruegmann shown satellite images or land use maps of Hamburg and LA side by side, his claims would immediately have been exposed as misleading.
Similarly, Bruegmann shocks his readers by pointing out that the Los Angeles Urban Area is denser on average than the New York Urban Area (NYUA). But few people know, and Bruegmann doesn't explain, that the NYUA (18 million population) encompasses a huge (indeed, a "sprawling") area in three states of which the city proper is only a fraction. The NYUA is a statistical artifact that includes compact cities as well as sprawling settlements and no critic of sprawl has ever, to my knowledge, pretended otherwise.
There is one statement in the book that I agree with, and it is the complaint about the lack of a common, coherent definition of sprawl. Reviewing the voluminous sprawl literature, one does in fact get reminded of the proverbial blind men examining an elephant (A rope! A snake! A tree!). Unfortunately Bruegmann has done nothing to improve that state of affairs. On the contrary he has muddied the waters even more by employing sloppy terminology, making up dubious historical parallels, and cherry-picking statistics to ultimately miss the point entirely: that sprawl as we know it is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable.
(*) Another example: "At the beginning of the Christian era, this great city [Rome] had an estimated population of about 1 million people piled up within city walls that enclosed a little more than six square miles." But Rome in the early imperial era (at the peak of its pre-modern population) was not a walled city. This may seem nit-picking but what purports to be a history of the urban form shouldn't commit that kind of blunder.
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