From Publishers Weekly
In 1950, 74 percent of the population of metropolitan Denver lived within the city’s borders. Twenty years later, that figure had plummeted to 42 percent, as sprawling towns along the highways siphoned jobs and people from the central city. Pollution, largely a result of ballooning traffic, frequently formed a "brown cloud" over the Mile-High City. By the mid-1970s, Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm would be forced to warn that "Denver is in danger of becoming an endless Los Angeles in the Rockies." Denver is one of three municipalities that serve as case studies in Gutfreund’s sobering analysis of transportation policy in the United States. Gutfreund is not the first to argue that Washington—guided by the auto industry, influential land developers and an anti-urban bias among policymakers—effectively subsidized sprawl and traffic congestion by promoting roads. But Gutfreund neatly traces the deep roots of these policies and the ways they destabilized cities while saddling state and local governments with huge bills for highway construction and maintenance. A useful companion to Crabgrass Frontiers, the landmark study of suburbia by Gutfreund’s Columbia University colleague, Kenneth T. Jackson, this book demonstrates that the problem of sprawl is national in scope, and not just confined to such Sunbelt boomtowns as Houston and Atlanta. (The other two communities discussed are Middlebury, Vt., and Smyrna, Tenn.) Gutfreund’s prose style is somewhat pedestrian and occasionally he gets repetitive. But he does a nice job of introducing readers to his three municipalities without getting bogged down in the details of road projects that only locals would recognize. Coming in an era when more and more communities are examining the costs of sprawl and questioning their dependence on the automobile, this book could not be timelier.
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Review
"Twentieth-Century Sprawl demonstrates convincingly how the financing of highways became a de facto national policy that subsidized growth on the urban periphery at the expense of older cities and inner-ring suburbs. We are living with the consequences of this policy today. A compellingly important book."--David Schuyler, Professor of American Studies, Franklin and Marshall College, and author of A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1940-1980
"A good primer on the road we took to the suburbanization of America--so that we don't drive it exactly the same way in the future."--Detroit Free Press
"In the first thorough history of urban sprawl, Owen Gutfreund reveals how misguided government programs, business lobbying, and civic boosterism led to America's radically decentralized urban landscape and shows the high social and financial costs of subsidizing automobility. Twentieth-Century Sprawl will appeal to historians, planners, and policy-makers--and anyone who wants to understand how we wound up in the traffic-clogged mess we're in."--Clifton Hood, Professor of History, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and author of 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York
"In examining three disparate sites--in Colorado, Tennessee, and Vermont--Owen Gutfreund convincingly argues that the impact of the automobile goes beyond individual preferences and local needs. Rather, he shows that automobility has been driven by government policies at all levels with profoundly disturbing consequences. Bound to fuel further criticism and debate, Gutfreund's study deserves close consideration in any future policy debate over the course of metropolitan development."--Howard Gillette, Jr., Professor of History, Rutgers University-Camden, and author of Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C.
"In Twentieth-Century Sprawl, Owen Gutfreund challenges prevailing myths equating highway construction with equity and choice to show how competition over finances, route ways, and political authority gave rise to cross-sectoral coalitions among advocates from rural roads, inter-metropolitan parkways, and a national system of primary motorways. Through a carefully selected set of case studies the author links policy with practice and we come to see our contemporary urban landscape anew, as the product of specialized knowledge, narrow definitions of the public good, and a surprising degree of ad hoc planning."--Greg Hise, School of Policy, Planning and Development, USC
