Book Review of "Sprawl: A Compact History"

Abstract

Cities have always sprawled, according to the conclusions of Robert Bruegmann in the book Sprawl: A Compact History. As populations of nations grow and the old rural areas need fewer workers, cities have to grow, but elites have been opposed as far back as Queen Elizabeth I who tried to limit the growth of London. By the late 1800s most of the nasty anti-sprawl vocabulary had been developed and is used to this day virtually unchanged by elites who try to tell the rest of the world we do not know how to live properly. Planning has become a normative undertaking and judges itself more as an art than a science, where elites set the tone and average person becomes an impediment to a better world.

Keywords

• sprawl
• racial discrimination
• urban planning
• urban growth
• economic development