ABSTRACT
William Whyte, sociologist and author of The Organization Man, is attributed to coining the term “urban sprawl” in a 1958 landmark essay. He criticized the large-scale suburban development of the postwar period. This criticism was fueled in part by the astounding rate of suburban housing construction in the 1950s. In the thirty-year period from 1890 to 1920, the total number of housing starts across the US ranged between 250,000 and 400,000 a year. In the 1950s alone, more than 15 million houses were constructed (Rome 2001).
