Everything will soon be everywhere and there won't be anything anywhere left

Smart growth or smarter sprawl? (From A Field Guide to Sprawl by Dolores Hayden, with Jim Wark.)

Dan Rodricks is a columnist for the Baltimore Sun, and his column from Sunday, "The developers are winning -- fish, Maryland are losing" assesses the success of mostly voluntary and incentive-based "Smart Growth" policies in arresting sprawl. He says:

"Though Maryland and Smart Growth became synonymous in the last decade, the developers are still winning. The environment, in both aesthetic and scientific terms, is still losing. The latest census data show that suburbia continues to sprawl across Maryland, deeper into what had been open space in rural areas. The fastest-growing counties last year were Cecil and Calvert, according to population estimates released Thursday.

The same day, a national environmental group, American Rivers, called the Susquehanna River, the great source of fresh water for the Chesapeake Bay, the "most endangered" in America. Along its path from Cooperstown, N.Y., through Pennsylvania and into Maryland, the Susquehanna picks up massive and debilitating amounts of farm fertilizer, lawn fertilizer, sewage and mud, and it brings tons of oxygen-depleting nutrients into the bay every day. Some parts of Maryland waterways are considered so bad that the state Department of the Environment proposed classifying them as too polluted to bother cleaning up at government expense. That's a kind of end-game policy, an admission, perhaps more practical than we like to admit, that we can't reverse two centuries of ruinous policies and practices of regional and local governments, industry and people. (...)

This is such a massive problem, related to population growth, capitalism, the forces of tradition and personal freedom, prejudice and greed. Population continues to grow and to spread across the countryside, as it has since the 1940s, away from cities. Apparently, the trend back to city life still doesn't compete with the trend toward tract housing in the suburbs and exurbs, even as gasoline prices climb toward $3 a gallon. And, in rural areas, just about any development is considered good development, even if the development changes the nature of the area it supposedly enhances.

For instance, the people who run Somerset County, with a population of about 26,000, seem to think it's a good idea that Wal-Mart build a 450,000- square-foot distribution center that might eventually employ 1,000 people. Wal-Mart was awarded a portion of Somerset County's Chesapeake Bay Critical Area growth allocation so that it could build the sprawling facility on agricultural land along a creek, according to the Daily Times in Salisbury. In January, the Somerset County commissioners signed a $1.3 million Community Development Block grant application to help Wal-Mart develop the land. (...)

And never mind that, in little old Somerset County, it might mean more development, more housing, more congestion, more traffic, more erosion, more pollution. We've got this idea that jobs should be everywhere, housing should be everywhere, shopping malls everywhere. Everything will soon be everywhere and there won't be anything anywhere left.
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This article from Architecture Week, "Costs of Dumb Growth", by John Fregonese and Lynn Patterson, is a pretty good discussion of the Portland experience and its "urban growth boundary" which is a more rigid regulatory action that directs development away from the greenfield and towards the region's core and already developed areas.

There are many other excellent discussions of these issues, including books like Suburban Nation, Home from Nowhere, Geography of Nowhere, Asphalt Nation... Steve Pinkus introduced me to the book Cities in Full, which is excellent, and Roberta Gratz, who I just found out after the fact spoke recently in Maryland, is the author of two great pro-city books, The Living City and Cities: Back from Edge.