Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Sprawl

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you have ever wondered what to call those cul-de-sacs that took the place of the dairy farm down the road, this field guide will finally give you the language to express yourself. With fascinating aerial photographs of all sorts of American sprawl, and interesting, to-the-point accompanying paragraphs, this field guide is a must to share with those neighbors of yours who lack the imagination to envision what will happen in their part of the woods (if the woods still exist) when subdividers come to town. (Naw, it's not happily ever after because the property taxes will increase revenue for the town.) Read this guide and you will never be content to leave the future of God's green earth in the hands of suburban planners again.

Dolores Hayden's intriguing book visually decodes fifty-one examples of bad building in the landscape and the use of aerial photography to do this was a good idea, sprawl by its nature stretches off into the horizon but when seen at ground-level could seem pretty ordinary. Some of the differences though, especially with domestic dwellings, seem a bit arbitrary, there are seven examples of housing shown which, to me, don't seem that different. With commercial sprawl it is easy to understand the visual differences, from 'Rural slammer' (Soledad) to 'Tank farm' (part of the port of Houston)

Though the book is primarily visual, with seventy-five well chosen aerial photos used to illustrate the categories, I thought the essay on the first ten pages was first class in explaining the reasons behind sprawl, basically the fault of those folk in Washington allowing commercial interests to favor suburban white populations and male-headed households during the last few decades. The back of the book has a useful bibliography, list of websites and index.

Jim Wark's aerial photos were used by the author to carefully explain the categories and you can see several hundred other examples of his work in 'America' (ISBN 8854400033). If you like aerial photos have a look at Alex MacLean's book 'Designs on the Land' (ISBN 0500284148) with over four hundred stunning color photos of what is happening commercially on the ground.

Though a large number of Americans live in the sprawl environment (and by choice, too) it is worth remembering that over ninety percent of the US is still open land. This fascinating book is a useful visual guide to how bad things can get.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

The numerous color aerial photos in this book do a wonderful job of putting US development patterns into a whole new perspective. This isn't intended to be the end all be all of commentary about sprawl. For that, there are plenty of other great books that emphasize analysis and critique rather than a visual approach (A Better Way to Live is an example of a terrific book in the former category). This book is a great introduction to the different kinds of sprawl and what they look like. Sure, Dolores Hayden puts a fairly cynical touch on what commentary there is, but when you see the pictures of how developers have ruined our open spaces, you'll understand why. In short, a great little book that achieves its purpose very well.

Where is J.B. Jackson when you need him? The spirit of the seemingly unbiased observer of the American built environment, who is said to have said that he never saw a landscape he didn't like, and who extracted a quiet poetry from the most modest, mundane, and - let's face it - sorry of places is strangely missing in this book. And what a shame. Regardless of what side of the sprawl debate you're on, you have to admit that some of the things produced by (and for the sake of) sprawl are, if not awe-inspiring, then at least wonderous. It may be ugly, wasteful, and dehumanizing, but sprawl is America's urban vanguard, and, for all the criticism that has been leveled at it, it remains true that, as Hayden herself acknowledges, "well-educated Americans often lack words for the cultural upheaval caused by rapid sprawl."

What is needed, then, is precisely what A Field Guide to Sprawl isn't: a scientific illumination of what's going on out there. The biggest (though unfortunately not the only) problem with A Field Guide to Sprawl is that it interprets when it should inform; proselytizes and polemicizes what it should explain. Thus in an entry for "duck" we're told not only what a duck is (a building that replicates and serves as an advertisement for the product sold within it), we're told (incredibly), that "while some Americans justify ducks as zany landmarks that help people locate themselves in sprawl, ducks are always out of context and do little to unify neighborhoods." In an entry for "big box" we're told, predictably, I suppose, that "big boxes undercut smaller, local businesses, causing abandoned buildings on Main Streets in older town centers."

Hayden is certainly aware of this criticism. In her introduction, she criticizes the American Planning Association's Glossary of Zoning, Development, and Planning Terms for "playing it safe" by "defining terms for zoning legislation in a neutral way." As an example, she sites the Glossary's definition of "billboard," which, in her eyes is too respectful for avoiding words like "garish" and "aggressive." Indeed, if we look up "billboard" in the index of A Field Guide to Sprawl we're told to see "litter on a stick."

A Field Guide to Sprawl is propaganda for the New Urbanist movement, plain and simple. Further evidence of this is the fact that many of the entries in fact have little to do with sprawl, but are nonetheless keywords in various (hackneyed) New Urbanist discourses. "Ball pork," for example, which "combines ballpark and pork barrel to describe a stadium built with public funds for the use of a privately owned ball team," is, as Hayden herself acknowledges, a largely urban phenomenon, as most new stadiums that get built today get built downtown. Ditto "theming," which, like "ball pork," is associated more with casinos, festival marketplaces, and other downtown developments than with sprawl. "Litter on a stick," "LULU," and "TOAD" are similarly out of place here.

But if A Field Guide to Sprawl is propaganda, what useless propaganda it is. This is the second problem with the book. It is poorly researched, and shockingly naive. Almost every entry in A Field Guide to Sprawl raised an eyebrow. In the entry for "manufactured housing" we're told that "manufactured housing contributes to sprawl because . . . units are often crowded together." In the photograph that illustrates the entry for "low density," we see a subdivision of about ten houses per acre (the intended subject of the picture), set in a landscape of farmhouses, each of which takes up about five acres (the intended background of the picture). Hayden's case against the "snout house" is that it's "difficult to see residents' activities since protruding garages take up most of the street frontage," and that it fails the "Trick-or-Treat Test," which measures how easily children can find the house's door. Moreover we're supposed to take solace in the fact that the city of Portland criminalized snout houses by limiting garage-frontage.

Moreover, A Field Guide to Sprawl is photographed poorly. Not only is the grainy, 35mm quality of the photographs mediocre at best, they don't do nearly enough to illustrate the entries. The photograph accompanying "strip," for example, is an aerial photograph of two gas stations. Accompanying "putting parsley round the pig" are some wildly colored plants lining a fairway. These pictures do not sing.

Are there exceptions? Of course. "Mall glut" is an illuminating concept and Jim Wark's aerial photo of a mall with "room to grow" is perfect. "Leapfrog," "groundcover," and "alligator" are also fascinating, but looking at them only wets the pallette. Granted, it's only a lexicon, but how about a few diagrams? How about some maps? How about some annotation? How about some history?

Hopefully, someone will steal Dolores Hayden's great idea and redo this book the way it should have been done (I nominate Atilier Bow-Wow). Again, Hayden's insight that "words such as city, suburb, and countryside no longer capture the reality of real estate development in the United States" couldn't be more true. J.B. Jackson, where are you when we need you?

I agree with both the positive and negative reviews: I loved the pictures (as did the positive reviews)- they definitely gave me a better feel for concepts like "pods" that I am used to seeing from ground level. But I also think that some of Hayden's language was unclear, needlessly polemical, or both. For example, she writes that ducks (buildings that serve as advertisements) "are always out of context and do little to unify neighborhoods." But what does it mean for a building to be "out of context"? How does a cheese shop "unify a neighborhood", whether it is ugly or pretty? Also, Hayden's points sometimes have little to do with sprawl- for example, she has an entry on "Export Garbage" but she does not explain why she thinks suburbs generate more garbage than cities.

But on balance I liked this book, mainly because she spends only a paragraph or two on each concept, so even the text entries I would have written differently did not take up a lot of my time.

Great coffee table book with humorous anecdotes and good pictures of what our man-made world has become in the last 60 years.

This is a beautifully illustrated glossary of some of the terminology that has become associated with the phenomenon of suburban sprawl. Such inventive terms as "ball pork" and "snout house" are illustrated with superb photographs, and accompanied by concise written explanations and selected references to help the reader follow up on topics of interest. This is not a textbook for urban planners, who will already be familiar with the content, but I have effectively used material from this guide in my introductory urban planning classes, where the exemplary photographs speak louder than a thousand words.

Small coffee-table format picture book. There is a 10-page introduction, which is excellent, then 51 vocabulary terms. Each vocab term is 2 pages - one page is an aerial example picture, the facing page is text describing the term. The terms are mostly pejorative (slang) and are critical of certain types of development. This is not "new" stuff many of these terms and criticisms go back to the 1940s. While some of the terms are obvious (strip malls, McMansions) much of it is not obvious and opens a whole new way of seeing why certain things are laid out the way they are. More so, it helps to predict how future development will happen based on current development patterns. This book is a layman's guide to development criticism. Should be required reading for all who live in a developing community.

This collection of outstanding aerial photos illustrates the nonsensical contempt for nature inherent in American social and economic systems, as embodied by sprawl. We build wasteful suburbs on productive farmland, and destroy watersheds to make way for developments that then need taxpayer-supported water systems. We've become so dependent on cars for all errands and social calls that developers don't even bother to make it possible to walk anywhere, while we mistakenly equate large lot sizes with privacy and outdoor solitude. We then give new soulless housing subdivisions and concentrated shopping districts names, featuring words like "Woods" or "Creek," that are mockeries of the ecosystems that were destroyed in order to build them. Dolores Hayden starts this book with various explanations for this unique brand of American waste, especially in terms of tax breaks and legal loopholes that encourage the development of virgin territory and the abandonment of formerly constructed areas. And don't forget the political influence of the real estate, construction, and transportation lobbies.

After the quick and informative introduction, the book is made up of remarkable and usually cringe-inducing aerial photos, by aviator Jim Wark, of sprawl in all its many forms. Hayden and Wark find real examples of many different categories of sprawl, featuring names coined by either developers or critics, such as boomburb, greenfield (a hideously inaccurate title), pod, and privatopia. These stunning and often disturbing photos truly illustrate the ridiculous nature of American sprawl in all its shapes and sizes. If you find yourself concerned by the nature of these photos, you may end up wishing you lived in a place where it was still possible to interact with your neighbors daily and do your errands easily on foot. Find a spot like that before they're all gone. [~doomsdayer520~]

I've heard many of the term before. Zoomburb. Big Box. Alligator. I guess that's what happens when you grow up in the house of an engineer. I figured this illustrated guide would be interesting to look at, so I picked it up. The pictures were only satisfactory, and some of the writing was above my head. I did learn lots of new terms though. However, I don't think I would recommend this unless you have some interest in land-use, urban planning, or architecture.