Growing Smarter: Fighting Sprawl and Restoring Community in America

Sprawl is not inevitable, but developers simply follow standard formulas and governments create policies to encourage such development. Thus, instead of comfortable cities that run like clockwork, we have cities that are scattered, clumsy, expensive, and increasingly hard to enjoy or even use. However, sprawl does much more than ruin the aesthetics of cities: it needlessly destroys the economic and environmental value of resource lands; it creates an inefficient land-use pattern that is very expensive to serve; it fuels competition, redundancy and conflict among local governments; it threatens economic viability by diffusing public infrastructure investments; it abandons established urban areas where substantial past investments, both public and private, have been made; it destroys the intrinsic visual character of the landscape; and it erodes a sense of community.
It may be impossible to turn today’s sprawling cities into European cities where one can walk everywhere. However, progress can be made. What's needed is research into urban planning policies that encourage sensibly dense environments and cut down on the amount of time we spend behind the wheel. What's needed is research into ways of making the automobile a servant instead of a master. In addition, governments must stop subsidizing the sprawling activities and governments must engage in more land-use planning.


Richard Moe, Growing Smarter: Fighting Sprawl and Restoring Community in America, Address Presented at San Joaquin Valley Town Hall Fresno, California, (Nov. 20, 1996) (transcript available at http://www.smartgrowth.org/library/Richard_Moe.html)