Is Sprawl Necessary? | FutureOfWhere

Headlines are quick hits from media outlets from Missouri and around the world. Follow the headline link for the full story. The source of this headline says:

Our metro areas are inevitably going to grow out as well as up. How can we manage that process to benefit our lives, our wallets, and our environment? . . .

My message . . . was that cities like Fort Worth are going to grow both up and out. And so we’d better make sure we do both pretty well. . . .

Sprawl is not the same thing as outward urban expansion.

Sprawl, in the classic definition, is low-density, unplanned, discontiguous, auto-oriented development.

Not all new suburban development has to fit that definition, but a lot of people who dislike sprawl paint all outward urban expansion with the sprawl brush. . . .

The issue here is not to halt this up-and-out pattern – either by halting the “up,” which NIMBYs typically want to do, but also by halting the “out,” which growth management types want to do – but to understand the up-and-out pattern and manage it in a way that works well for the entire city and the entire region. For example, our transit and freeway systems are both many decades old and they both revolve around the assumption that everybody commutes downtown to work which is simply not true.

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Is Sprawl Necessary? | FutureOfWhere