This was originally written for a Sierra Club mailing list in
October, 1999.
I'm a little disappointed that the discussion of sprawl and
population growth has been so polarized. On the one hand, some people
argue that an infinitely growing population is not a problem; on the
other, some argue that it is the "key driver of environmental
destruction," implying that it is the primary cause of sprawl.
Neither is true.
Population growth is an important environmental issue. It's clear
that, in general, more people on the planet mean that more resources
must be used to support them. More land must be taken from wild use
and put toward agricultural use or used for housing. Technological
fixes such as the so-called "green revolution" have decreased
biodiversity and jeopardized our food supply by making it vulnerable
to epidemics. Genetically engineered food plants come with their own
sources of danger. So population growth must be recognized as a
serious problem, and one that we as Club members should be helping to
solve.
On the other hand, we must also recognize not everything bad is the
result of population growth. Growing population by itself is not the
source of our problem with sprawl. Rust Belt cities that have had
shrinking or stable populations still have expanded pell-mell into
the countryside. An increasing population is not responsible for the
loss of wild and rural land around Buffalo, Providence, and similar
cities. We cannot eliminate sprawl simply by limiting population
growth.
Does that mean we should accept population growth as a good thing?
Not at all. But we may realize that it's easier to guide the
floodwaters to a floodplain than to try to put up a dam. We need to
have more than one strategy for dealing with growth -- try to stop
it, but if we cannot (and we should not pretend we have control over
it when we do not), direct it so that it is more sustainable than it
would be otherwise.
So what does cause sprawl?
Sprawl is new construction happening at the fringes of the urbanized
area instead of in already developed areas. It's absolutely true that
one reason sprawl happens is because population and employment
growth require new construction, and new construction is now occurring
predominantly at the edge.
But population growth is far from the only thing that causes new
construction. There are many reasons that workplaces and housing are
taken down in the center and rebuilt at the fringes. Sometimes this
is because the buildings are old and dilapidated. Sometimes this is
because they occupy space that people wish to use for other purposes.
(Parking lots have been a major cause of displacement.) Sometimes
they are simply obsolete.
Sprawl is caused by all these changes moving the city outward.
Even a city with no population growth will still experience change in
its buildings. Stopping sprawl will entail redirecting this development
back inward, to already developed areas, instead of out on the fringe.
What about "smart growth"?
Somehow the idea that there are better and worse ways to grow got
transmuted into the idea that there are good and bad ways to grow --
a small but important distinction. It is still useful to discuss forms of
development that are "smart" and those that are "dumb," even if we
are trying to reduce growth overall.
What kind of cities should we have?
The question of sprawl comes down to what kind of cities we should
have. Should our cities spread out across the landscape or be limited
to compact urban areas?
This question is still valid whether or not there is population growth.
Even if there were population *shrinkage*, it would still be a valid
question to ask which is more environmentally sustainable:
spread-out development or compact development? Population
shrinkage would make the question less urgent, as unsustainable
activity would have a larger resource base to consume, but no
less relevant.
I suppose someone might make a case for a spread-out city as
one that's better environmentally, but I haven't heard one yet, and
frankly I'd be very skeptical. The case for compact cities is really
pretty simple: that "reduce, reuse, recycle" should be applied to
land use as well as consumable goods. The more land we build on,
the less land is available for wild land and more environmentally
friendly uses.
Carrying capacity
It's been said that we need to live within the carrying capacity of the
planet; we need to ensure that we don't exceed the capability of the
natural resources to sustain us. This is absolutely true. However,
the amount of natural resources we consume is not a fixed amount
per person. Someone who does not have a lawn uses a lot less water
than someone who does. Someone who lives in a small apartment
requires less heat than someone who lives in a large house. Living
within our carrying capacity has to be about how we live as well as
how many we are.
What about choice?
It's been argued that cities should have the choice whether to
be compact or whether they should be spread out. I am always
surprised to hear this argument from environmentalists. Normally,
environmentalists do not argue that it should be a choice whether to
have a citywide recycling program or not, or to log one's own stand
of old growth forest, or take other environmentally damaging action.
But apparently it's supposed to be OK to choose a spread-out city
over a compact city.
We need to recognize that "People should be able to choose" is not
an environmentalist argument. It is an argument that ignores our moral
responsibility for preserving the natural environment, for its own
sake or for the sake of future generations. It might be argued that a
difference lies in this choice being made by a community rather than
an individual. But, even if this were true (and it is not; decisions
on such issues as solid waste disposal are made by cities) our
communities do not end at the city limits.
Of course, the arguments have been made many times that in fact our
society skews choices towards the outer fringe away from the center.
The low supply of new housing, decisions made by our employers, the
economies of scale of new developments on the edge, all encourage
us to move outward rather than inward, even if that's not what we might
otherwise like. When we ask people what they'd like to live in, they
often identify kinds of buildings that aren't available given other
constraints on their choices. This needs to be rectified.
In practice, building choices are very slow to change. We already have a
tremendous amount of sprawl development that has been built since the 1940s.
Those who prefer that sort of living will have that choice for a very long time
to come. But future developments need to take into account the environmental
costs of that choice.
What makes a community livable as well as sustainable?
Books have been written, and will no doubt continue to be written,
about this issue. I don't think "livability" is something that can be
measured. It's a fundamentally subjective feeling that a place is an
appropriate one in which to spend time.
It's clear that some people seem to find spread-out suburbs better
places to live, and some people compact cities. We're not going to
magically bring everyone to agreement on this issue in this forum.
But I think it can be said without fear of contradiction that cities
can be good places to live, and millions of people enjoy compact
city life and find it a positive experience. The Club's web site at
http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/community
is a good start to explain how some people, at least, believe it to be so.
It is my belief that when an alternative is preferred by many people,
and is shown to be more sustainable, it is something
environmentalists should be advocating. That isn't to say we should
advocate the wholesale return of the suburbs to wild conditions, any
more than we have pushed for the elimination of disposable forks
and plates, or the elimination of all private forestry. But it does mean
that we need to see sprawl as an issue that's not just an individual
choice. We need to see living and working in the central city the way
we see choosing to use recycled goods -- often just common sense
and not necessarily deserving of accolades, but as something that
nonetheless is clearly preferable to the alternative, from an
environmental perspective.
Isn't it all about transportation?
I suppose somebody, somewhere, must be in favor of compact cities
only in order to make transit work. But the linkage between land use
and transportation isn't just one way.
A spread-out city doesn't work well with transit because there are
not enough origins and destinations close to the transit stops to
make them practical. But it's also true that a compact city doesn't
work well with cars, because the space required to park the cars
is very great. That requires either very expensive parking garages
(limiting the ability of the city to build compactly; only those uses
that provide a high economic return can afford to ) or the provision
of large parking lots (thus making the city less compact).
It's a bit of an oversimplification, but in essence there are two
kinds of cities: spread-out car cities and compact transit cities.
In practice, we have real spread-out car cities in the suburbs,
which have all the environmental problems of sprawl, and a sort of
half-way mixed system in most of our central cities, with inadequate
transit and many parking lots that end up pushing development further
outward and also make the city feel less connected, and thus less
livable. This is the result of decades of mistreating our central cities.
This is something that needs to end.
Isn't density bad?
Density just means putting more things in less space. Using less
land for the same population.
There are real reasons why density has a bad name, but they are
not intrinsic to building at a higher density than is typical in sprawl.
For example, since density generally requires larger structures, a
bad design for a structure has a greater impact, and there are
an awful lot of really bad buildings out there: International Style
buildings that are alienating and not on a human scale. This
really is a matter of design rather than density per se. Many of
the Brutalist college campus buildings of the 1950s and 1960s
are not particularly dense, but are just as alienating and have an
equally negative effect. The answer here is relearning patterns of
architecture from prior to Modernism. Architects need to design
buildings that fit fit the pattern of street development and not
break out of it as an artistic statement.
Another reason density has a bad name is because of the
blockage of light. This is one of the main reasons that the
"anti-Manhattanization" movement in San Francisco was started.
Of course, the very parts of San Francisco that were most negatively
affected by shadows cast by buildings from the the '80s building boom
are far, far more dense than anything in the suburbs. There is a
limit to how high buildings can go without causing shadow problems,
of course, and we do need to be careful, but there's a lot of middle
ground between the typical suburb and Hong Kong.
Finally, the most common reason one hears to argue against density
is because density brings cars, and they bring traffic congestion,
noise, and pollution. I shouldn't even need to point out that the
cars, not the density, are the problem here.
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