Urban sprawl is the effect of the suburbs—houses that are further apart than in the city, grocery stores that are too far away to walk to, better school districts, better roads than in the country. Urban sprawl has been increasing since soon after World War II, when cities were booming and automobiles became a main source of transportation. There are pros and cons to urban sprawl. One of the cons is the possible affect on air quality because of the necessity of driving in the suburbs. Nothing is close enough to walk to, so people drive to work, to the grocery store, to pick up the kids from school, etc. In the middle of a city, the grocery store is probably easy to walk to than drive to and public transportation is readily available and cuts down on automobile use. The cost of providing transportation goes up when the population goes down. This makes the possibility of creating good public transportation in small towns very low. I grew up in Champaign, a town of about 120,000, which has a great public transportation (bus) system. Eureka, Illinois, is small enough to walk around in, but few people walk because they all own cars. A city that is a suburb has even more problems, because it is often a bedroom community with no grocery stores, etc, so it is necessary to drive everywhere. One solution to these problems that the website suggests is a Personal Rapid Transportation system (PRT). PRT offers individual pod cars which are automatically driven on a gridline in a city and its suburbs. PRT is unique because it offers privacy (individual cars for a few people) and goes to the destination that the passenger picks instead of sticking to a schedule. PRT could be used to transport goods and people. Because PRT pods are light, the gridlines could be small and take up less space, and would therefore be cheaper. PRT would decrease air pollution, in part because of decreased starting and stopping time and the possibility of using electric or solar power. PRT is currently only in two cities: Morgantown, West Virginia and London Heathrow Airport.
In modern suburbs things like cul-de-sacs and tangle towns are more common to be designed with. This makes it virtually impossible to include a mass transit system into the suburb. Thus, more driving, more gas use, and more emissions created in the atmosphere. A common response to this from a suburban residential is that the city is jam packed with congestion and pollution from stop and go traffic. Yet with cities, they are more dense, highly populated and many of the stop and go traffic is created by workers who live in the suburbs coming into the city at rush hour. One thing that works well in a typical city is mass transit. Things like buses, subways and train systems work well with block by square block areas, but not so with winding curving neighborhoods such as in suburbs. Another reason why mass transit does not play a major roll in the life of one who lives in a suburb is that suburban commuting consists of many different directions and destinations. Where as in the city typical people are commuting into the downtown. A central destination such as a downtown keeps things more conveniently close, and since so many people are making the trip to one single common place then gas can be saved by major carpooling, or in other words mass transit.
Reshaping Metropolitan America provides an outlook of the next fifteen years for infrastructure development in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of the buildings that will be necessary to handle the projected half billion residents of the Untied States by 2030 are not built yet. We also need to reshape our cities to handle the inversion trend; families and the next generation want to move back and live near downtown. Richard C. Nelson, the author, supports this population shift but does not strongly support it. Instead of trying to create room and additional infrastructure in downtown areas, Nelson believes that metropolitan areas should start to urbanize its suburbs to accommodate desired urban living. The American population is also changing
Many Americans would be shocked to learn that the American Dream may be the cause
As with most major metropolitan areas urban sprawl has become an issue with Irvine, California being no exception. Byproducts of sprawl include an increase in jobs, increases in population density, increased traffic, and increased housing costs. I selected the affordable housing policies of the City of Irvine in my paper. Due to the high cost of housing in Irvine, the city has faced lawsuits and other challenges in providing housing for low income earners.
Urban Consolidation Factors and Fallacies in Urban Consolidation: Introduction As proponents of urban consolidation and consolidated living continue to manifest in our society, we must ensure that our acknowledgment of its benefits, and the problems of its agitator (sprawl), do not hinder our caution over its continually changing objectives. Definition Like much urban policy, the potential benefits that urban consolidation and the urban village concept seek to offer are substantially undermined by ambiguous definition. This ambiguity, as expressed through a general lack of inter-governmental and inter-professional cohesion on this policy, can best be understood in terms of individual motives (AIUSH,1991). * State Government^s participatory role in the reduction of infrastructure spending.
The third listing for the definition of sprawl in the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is as follows: “to spread or develop irregularly”. Unfortunately, this is the pattern, or lack thereof, with which America’s development is following. Every single day the world population rises, and these new babies have to live somewhere. Due to the fact that the birth rate is larger than that of the death rate in America (http://www.bartleby.com/151/a24.html), new homes and communities must be developed to accommodate all of the incoming people. This fundamental concept is coupled by another very powerful driving force prompting people to live in the suburbs of America, and that is greed. The economy makes available to the country a degree of ownership never before matched in our history, and people are taking advantage of it. This idea drives people to move from the congested, smoky, and frantic cities to the serenity of the countryside, where they have the opportunity to own much more land and live a more peaceful life. For a time this worked very nicely as portrayed in the incredible success of the communities created by William Levitt. Levittown was a dream of William Levitt, which encompassed the idea that all Americans can afford a home in the country. It was a success in the time of its creation, but we are beginning to see the dangers that this type of super growth brings along with it. Urban sprawl is an issue that will require much attention in the future, to prevent the negative effects that are already taking their toll.
First of all, as I explained before, the more urban development happens, the more the city has to pay for. Of course, if this sprawl continues at the same rate, civilians would have to pay more taxes in the future. Furthermore, although transit is being majorly developed, the sprawl is also making cities more dependent on automobiles. For example, to go somewhere nearby, it is much easier to go in a personal vehicle rather than having to wait for a bus. As the city develops more, it is creating more nearby places to go to. This is how suburban sprawl could result in me becoming more dependent on my personal automobile in the future. Lastly, sprawl can lead to climate change and air pollution in the future. This is because it requires energy for things like construction and automotive transit which results in burning fossil fuel. With the increased amount of fossil fuels burned, it would also increase the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. That is how suburban sprawl could affect my
Urban sprawl is a widespread concern that impacts land use, transportation, social and economic development, and most importantly our health. Poorly planned development is threatening our health, our environment and our quality of life. Sprawl is blamed for many things such as asthma and global warming, flooding and erosion, extinction of wildlife, and most importantly the public health such as social isolation and obesity due to people driving everywhere. Building offices, homes, shops, schools and other buildings influences the building of roads, transit and other transportation modes. This relationship that can lead to safe, walkable, diverse and lively communities or out of control, poorly planned urban sprawl. Unfortunately sprawl has been winning and the public health is at risk.
Have you ever had a dream of moving outside the city and living with your wife, husband or kids with about an acre of land. Well if your dream becomes reality, than you are participating in Urban Sprawl. Urban Sprawl is the expanding of a city over its rural land with single-family homes in low-density neighborhoods. Low-density neighborhoods, with no transportation options are increasing energy costs. My cure is multiple story housing inside the city. Urban Sprawl is negative, because it causes bad health and environmental effects on society.
Before cars, people traveled by carriages, horses, streetcars and bicycles. These methods of transportation were not as effective as the car, so transportation over long distances was not entirely facilitated. This is why the innovation of the automobile was so important to the creation of suburbs and other areas of living outside the city. Transportation was facilitated and citizens could finally afford to leave the dirty and crowded city and commute from their quiet country homes outside of the mess of people and disease. Since World War II, cars have entirely reshaped cities and their near suburbs dramatically (Chafe). The automobile industry, mainly due to cars, has not only replaced the rail service that existed prior, and a great deal of the pedestrian popularity, but this industry has also strongly influenced the growth of inner city areas lacking in any type of transportation service. In the past, rails connected urban cores directly with their outskirts and suburbs before the invention of automobiles. In the past, city streets had generally followed the patterns of the streetcars as well as transportation routes and roads before them, however, it was just a matter of time before cars outgrew the capacity of the old routes. A journalist from
The conquering and development of natural land has in the past, been seen as a mark of human civilization. In the United States, our progress is often measured by growth and development, but should this be re-examined? There are many opinions on the subject of urban sprawl and its effects on wildlife, but one thing is for certain, we are expanding. From 1955 to 2005, urban and suburban areas grew by 300%, however, the population only increased by 75% over the same period (Ewing, Kostyack and Chen). According to NatureServe, a non-profit conservation organization, urban sprawl threatens one of every three endangered species in the United States. NatureServe’s analysis states, “rare and endangered species data shows that three-fifths (60 percent) of the nation’s rarest and most imperiled species are found within designated metropolitan areas, with the 35 fastest growing large metropolitan areas home to nearly one-third (29 percent) of these species. (Ewing, Kostyack and Chen) Nevertheless, other groups believe urban sprawl is beneficial to wildlife. The Landscape Analysis Lab at Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee argues that suburbs are doing more for the bird populations in Tennessee than the government supported tree plantations. Their data shows more diverse bird populations making suburbs their home. They find the housing developments more suitable since they are likely to have a wide variety of tree and plant species and other structures that provide diverse nesting opportunities, whereas the tree plantations usually only plant one type of tree (Miller). So, the debate continues, are humans encroaching on wildlife habitat and posing a risk to their survival, or do suburban environments with their lush lawns and...
Started from the 1950s, the movement that many post-war cities expanded outward to form a mass migration from the center of the city surrounded by low-density suburban living patterns generally referred to as "urban sprawl." The problems posed by the...
Many factors and geographical processes, the foreshore of Sydney Harbour has constantly faced changes in land use which has effected the environment, social communities and the economy in both positive and negative ways. Urban decay, urban renewal, urban consolidation and gentrification are the geographical process that are involved in the changing gland use around the Sydney Harbour foreshore. These geographical processes are what changes the land use from being used as industrial, residential and commercial which then impacts the economy, social communities/ public, the environment and the stakeholders.
Suburbia is the expired perception of the American dream; it is shaped by the desire for land, green space, privacy, and safety. Whereas, the metropolis is shaped by economics, business, culture, and the exchange of ideas. These different environments create separate lifestyles that seldom overlap. Dense urban centers are naturally more sustainable than a low density suburb as they consume less energy, are less dependent on automobiles, have greater access to economic opportunities, and have more cultural amenities. With future population growth, communities must respond to the increasing housing demand. In the United States, metropolitan growth does not increase density, it increases sprawl. Why does the U.S.
Sprawl is basically the uncontrolled horizontal growth of cities. It needs to be managed because it eats up the necessary, adjacent agricultural lands that are the valuable part of the local food system. Additionally, the travel times to work and recreation are significantly increased, with higher dependencies on personal vehicles.