American suburbia came into its own in the 1940s and '50s, as policy makers and entrepreneurs joined forces to make the suburbs a viable alternative to city and country life. As millions moved to the new communities, intellectuals complained that the emerging landscape combined too-tightly controlled residential districts with uncontrolled commercial sprawl, fostering a culture that was simultaneously conformist and disengaged. The same critique persists in only somewhat altered form today. (Gerald E. Frug,(1980))
Consider the much-maligned American suburb. For decades now, it has been mocked by authors and intellectuals as the sterile, soul-crushing birthplace of such cultural blights as McMansions and strip malls. Hollywood, too, has caught on. Witness the success of the Oscar-winning movie "American Beauty" and the Emmy-winning TV show "Desperate Housewives." Both depict everyone in suburbia as somehow weird or depraved. In recent years a whole movement has coalesced, the so-called New Urbanism, to sneer at suburban sprawl and all its various progeny.
Yet as Robert Bruegmann shows in "Sprawl: A Compact History," the conventional anti-suburbs wisdom is often just plain wrong. Mr. Bruegmann, a professor of urban planning and art history at the University of Illinois, takes every assumption about "sprawl" a pejorative to be sure and turns it on its head. Many of the characteristics associated with sprawl such as low-density development and lack of regional or public-use planning he argues, have been present in prosperous cities since the beginning of urban history. They are the natural effects of a city's gaining economic maturity not the recent consequence of vulgar Americans insisting on living in monstrous, single-use homes, as many sprawl detractors purport. As Mr. Bruegmann persuasively demonstrates, people and businesses have always had good reasons for wanting to leave the city.( Gerald E. Frug,(1980)).............
