ABSTRACT
No spatial policy issue has preoccupied urbanists more than urban sprawl. Most academic social scientists, environmentalists, urban planners condemn sprawl for using up prime farmland, threatening plant and animal communities, contributing to air pollution and global climate change, fostering racial and class segregation, isolating women, and contributing to a host of other ills. Americans have sprawl because of their frontier roots and anti-urban bias. They are uniquely anti-urban. American cities are different from European cities, they say, because Americans are at heart anti-urban, attached to unfettered individualism, low-density living, and automobile usage. A recent version of the attempt to explain urban form by inherent nature of the capitalist system is the widespread idea that sprawl has some relation to the increasing globalization of markets. The federal government, they say, fueled sprawl through homeowner subsidies, highway programs, infrastructure subsidies, and federal income tax deductions. Another favored explanation for sprawl is that it was caused by new communications and transportation technologies.
