Sprawl: It’s bad for us and WE know it.
As a prologue to the Roundtable on Sprawl I’d like to get everyone thinking and maybe say a few things that you won’t like 
Last week I took the time to visit Artcite and view the photographs on display. Overall, I was disappointed with the content of the work. Now, art is personal and I get that but, the task was to demonstrate the negative aspects of sprawl on the natural environment and on existing communities. To me, the main culprit of sprawl is the automobile and its worst side effect is the massive expanses of asphalt that have been spawned all around us as roads, parking lots, even walking paths. I was disappointed that this subject matter was not more prominent. It was almost as if even the people that want to document the negative side of sprawl were in denial about the automobile, IMO the primary driver of sprawl and the worst culprit when it comes to negative urban impact.
Several images were of tags and even a person with gang colours with a “crips” tag on a wall in the background. I don’t see gang activities and gang culture as a product of sprawl. I will acknowledge that the dearth of opportunities for young people in the suburbs creates a breeding ground for vandalism and anti-social behaviour but, gang activity exists in all types of communities including high-density, inner-city, walkable communities. Gang culture and the “thug” image are heavily promoted to young people in popular culture. Even though it is essentially anti-social behaviour with very little redeeming social value it is promoted and packaged with gusto by Hollywood and the music industry.
I did have a favourite photo. It was a line of perhaps two dozen toy cars all lined up against a fence at a daycare. To me this image captured the essence of sprawl and car culture. From a very young age, our children are programmed to want cars and to aspire to car ownership and citizenship in the utopia of the automobile.
If you were starting to get the feeling that sprawl was on the way out, take a look at the June issue of Architect magazine. The feature article is on the town of Buckeye, Arizona a Phoenix exurb of 25,000 in the middle of the desert. The articles author tells us that this little town has big plans to grow to 400,000 in the next twenty-five years. So far the town has approved or begun approvals on 22 planned communities within their boundaries. There is much talk of new urbanist planning and design but in reality it is production housing and national chain stores and highways connecting it all together.
Here’s a main stream, professional magazine whole heartedly embracing sprawl. Like most other professions, planning and architecture have their fair share of practitioners that are driven to leave their mark on the world. The planners and architects in Buckeye see the blank canvas of the Arizona desert as a place to build their legacies. Closer to home I was a little disturbed when I read the Windsor Star article introducing Thom Hunt as our city’s new Planning Manager. (I apologize but I couldn’t find the story on-line to link to.) At the end of that story Mr. Hunt talked about the lands south of the airport and how it was his vision to create new communities out there.
Tonight we will get together and tell ourselves that sprawl is bad and we will congratulate the visionaries in our midst and we’ll go away feeling that we have done some good but, understand this, we are still far from the end of sprawl. The developers and planners and contractors that have been foisting this unsustainable way of life on us have too much to lose, they’ve invested too much time and money in their schemes to just roll over. Until the masses, your neighbours, our politicians understand that everything about sprawl is bad and that our folly of paving over pastures and spreading ourselves so thin will cost us so much more than just the money wasted, we will have to keep up our campaign.
I hope to see you all this evening.
Tags: Architecture, culture, planning department, sustainable development, Urban Design, urban sprawl
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Well said James!! Non of our current politicians, city administrators or mover and shaker types in Windsor have the testicular fortitude to say what needs to be said. Therefore we can not look to these people for the change thats needed, unfortunately.
I’m reading “Fast Food Nation” and there’s lots of information about Walt Disney. There’s a part that says he wanted to build Disney World because he didn’t like what had become of the area around Disneyland (orange groves torn down to make way for parking lots, strip malls, flat expanses of concrete, fast food restaurants, etc.) even though he was instrumental in having all of this destruction happen. Very interesting and very sad.
You don’t have to look to Arizona for very bad examples of sprawl, the July/August 2008 issue of the Canadian Geographic has a very sad and horrific article on the Okanagan Valley, a rare United Nations heritate eco system that is being devastated by sprawl, vineyards, retirees and investors from around the world AND they are running out of water!
http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/ja08/feature_okanagan_valley.asp
This isn’t the full article but look at the picture at the top of the column! There are five copies of this magazine at the Windsor Public Library, so you don’t have to buy it! Well four now, I have one checked out!
China and India might have the last say in what future lands that Thom Hunt wants to develop in Wndsor, especially the new lands way to the east. The cost of construction materials is skyrocketing through the stratosphere, with China and India buying up every mineral, rock and tree in Africa and everywhere else, the future price of any construction material will be well beyond what Windsor can afford..And I am bettng on it to slow development outward in this city. And the longer he and anybody else waits the more it is going to cost per kilometre and this time the city better recover the total cost of developing such lands from the developers and the new home owner/businesses!!!!
They are predicting in the States that by 2025 there will be 22 to 25 million surplus (read empty) single family homes in the United States!
And I don’t know how Hunt can even look at new green land development in Windsor’s current economic downward spiral that hasn’t even bottomed out yet. It has taken Youngstown Ohio two generations to come back after the steel industry collapsed and disappeared in the 1970’s!!! And we are just now starting out on our downward spiral or in pc terms “shrinkage”!
It just isn’t make the land ready for development roads (traffic volumes and congestion), sewers, sidewalks but public transportation, schools, libraries and parks that also have to factored in that will have to be part of the development fees passed on to the home owner because I’m not subsidizing anymore sprawl detrimental to the core of this city. We have been paying for Windsor’s cheap development since the 1950’s and have gotten nothing in return but a derelict core of a city. Maybe if the new home owner was presented with the REAL BILL for building and buying his home that he might want to look inward. And don’t forget the projected cost of maintaining all the infrastructure for at least fifty years, put that in the bill for the developer!!!!
The Home Show on Cogeco is now advertising a million dollar homes in the burbs, that in some cases have been on the market for over six months!
Yep! Go ahead and plan new green developments when most of Windsor and the burbs might be sitting empty for forty years to come!
How about a farming Thom? With the price of food also going through the roof and beyond and the lower standards of safety in foods coming from foreign countries, having controlled local food production might be a better answer than more sprawl!
Victoria Rose, you might want to read after the Fast Food Nation a book by Thomas Pawlick:
The End of Food: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply-And What You Can Do About It
From Amazon.ca: “IN THE END OF FOOD, award-winning Canadian journalist and part-time farmer Thomas F. Pawlick documents the impending food crisis and traces its direct cause to the harmful methods of food production and processing currently used by the so-called agri-food industries—a corporate-run “factory farm” system that increasingly values profits over nourishment—to the detriment of everyone’s health and well-being. It’s a bleak picture, backed by hard-hitting evidence and true stories, but Pawlick makes it abundantly clear that it is not too late and devotes the latter part of the book to the many ways that ordinary citizens can take back control of the food supply by becoming active on a local level. This is an essential handbook for informing ourselves about the frightening but real decline of the quality of the food we eat and a self-defense guide to what everyone can do to put a stop to it.
About the Author
THOMAS F. PAWLICK has more than thirty-five years of experience as a journalist and editor, specializing in science, environmental, and agricultural reporting. He is a three-time winner of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association National Journalism Award and has won the National Magazine Award for agricultural reporting. He lives on a 150-acre farm in eastern Ontario”
It is time to invest in local farming, local foods and urban farming! First it was our pets that were killed by food stuffs from China, next it will be us!