"It is possible that even when a small, remote star explodes, this event can reorder the entire gravitational system of a galaxy. A slight wobble in the axis of a planet can mean drastic warming in one area and cooling in another. So it is with urban systems, the main difference being that the most basic element in the urban system is the individual human being who can think and make decisions. Any change made by any member of any neighborhood affects, to some degree, everyone else in the metropolitan area."
p. 94
"The term 'sprawl' has never had a coherent or precise definition. This has been one of the reasons it has been such a powerful polemical tool. Thinking of it as a blank screen on which a great many people project their own feelings of discontent with contemporary urban conditions is a good way to approach the history of the anti-sprawl movement. Because of the lack of a precise agreement about what sprawl is, individuals have been free to rally around certain broad but quite abstract concepts as a way to explain what is wrong with developments they see around them without necessarily agreeing on any specific diagnosis of the problems or any concrete set of prescriptions. It has allowed people with radically different assumptions to find common cause."
p. 115
"The same homebuyers who might try to maximize their personal advantage in buying a suburban house are the voters who elect government officials and who push for land-use regulations that will benefit them, often at the price of other parts of the population. Is it logical to think that landowners would suddenly act in a completely different fashion when they engage in political rather than economic transactions? Nor is the kind of behavior that puts personal interest above community welfare peculiar to low-density settlements. The resident of a central city who tries to block the badly needed expansion of a hospital next door to his apartment building because it would block his view is acting in a similar fashion."
p. 99
"Affluent residents of Youngstown who move to the exurban fringe are merely exploiting one of the most important assets available in the metropolitan area - a large supply of attractive land at low prices. Although at first glance it appears that the dispersal to the edges does little other than eviscerate the central cities and displace agriculture, in many cases, the possibility of building a house on a large tract of inexpensive land in the exurban fringe is the one thing that continues to attract middle-class residents who might otherwise flee to more dynamic regions. If, as is quite likely, Youngstown's downtown and central residential districts revive, it will not be despite sprawl but because sprawl has made it possible for the metropolitan area to retain residents during extremely difficult years."
p. 89
"In the early years of the 21st century, it appears that the forces of renewal and gentrification are becoming dominant in an increasing number of central cities. The old 'crisis of the central city,' in which jobs were departing and property values plunging, could well turn out to have been a short-lived phenomenon...
Many smart growth activists believe that as people return to the city in greater numbers, this movement of people will create population gains and an increased density that will reduce the pressure for outward expansion. Increasingly, however, as affluent citizens have moved to the center, they are doing just what their counterparts have long done in the suburbs. They have found that they can use zoning ordinances, historic preservation measures, environmental regulations, and other means to resist continued change, to control the appearance and character of their neighborhoods, and to stop densities from rising. In city after city, the old zoning codes have been downzoned time and again to reduce the ultimate possible population and prevent existing densities from rising."
p.57-58
"What few people seemed to notice was the way the rising fortunes of the center, like their earlier decline, were directly connected to developments at the edge. As more and more businesses and people, including even some of the least affluent members of the urban community, arrived at the urban periphery, it lost much of its exclusivity and social cachet. The number of individuals at the very top of the social ladder who wished to buy large houses in the farthest subdivision declined dramatically in the last decades of the twentieth century. As this happened, the central city and older established suburbs began to regain some of the luster they had lost in the postwar decades.
One of the ironies of this revival is that while central cities have traded on their 'traditional' character, much of what is most attractive about them is the fact that so many of the things that once defined them have disappeared. The decanting outwards of all kinds of manufacturing and warehousing functions led to dramatic reduction in street congestion, truck traffic, and pollution. This allowed city centers to become increasingly attractive to those who have the choice to live anywhere they wish in the metropolitan area and who in previous decades might well have chosen to live in the suburbs or exurbs."
p. 53-54
- Robert Bruegmann
