David Sanders, Arizona Daily Star

Other articles by Jim Kiser:

A deadly fight our desert cannot afford to loseGuest Opinion: Legislature must stop predatory payday lendersMy opinion Jim Kiser : I'm leaving, but not for retirement My opinion Jim Kiser: Before I go: Four reforms to enact, one to rejectMy opinion Jim Kiser: Report on Rainbow Bridge raises several concernsMy opinion Jim Kiser : Fund BLM to preserve our history My opinion Jim Kiser: Transportation OK signals new era of cooperationMy opinion Jim Kiser: Legislative leaders' budget would cause discord, harmMy opinion Jim Kiser : Cutting taxes is cynical move that ultimately costs us more My opinion Jim Kiser: Committee's inquisition a lesson in reckless civics

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Sprawl is bad. Everybody knows that. It diminishes open space. It creates long commutes and worsens traffic congestion. It causes social and economic fragmentation. It undercuts the quality of urban schools. It saps the treasuries of cities and counties as they extend roads, water and sewer lines to outlying areas. It even plays a role in expanding waistlines by encouraging a sedentary lifestyle.

But is this all true? Not really, says Robert Bruegmann, a professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Sprawl actually has benefits, including providing ordinary citizens with some of the choices once reserved primarily for the wealthy, Bruegmann writes in a provocative new book with the ironic title "Sprawl: A Compact History."

In short, Bruegmann contends that almost everything we've ever heard or believed about sprawl probably is wrong. In making that argument, Bruegmann provides a much-needed historical context and challenges many myths — including that sprawl is worst in western cities such as Tucson, Phoenix and Los Angeles. And by stripping away the emotions accompanying the word "sprawl," he allows for a more objective analysis of this phenomenon we've learned to hate.

Sprawl is widely seen as an American creation, occurring especially with the development of the automobile and the increased affluence that followed World War II. Instead, Bruegmann contends, even in ancient Rome an area called "suburbium" grew up outside the city's security walls. Undesirable facilities such as slaughterhouses, brick kilns and other industries located there. And on the other side of the city, the wealthiest Romans maintained elegant villas near the sea or in the cool hills east of Rome.

London, too, sprawled. By the 17th century it saw a vast influx of new residents. The increased prosperity allowed aristocratic families to develop affluent suburbs to the west, while large-scale warehouses and industrial facilities spread out to the east. As a consequence, the central city started to decline in density as the periphery started to fill up.

If any one city is considered the modern epitome of sprawl, it is Los Angeles. Yet that turns out to be one of many misconceptions about sprawl in America.

Here is a startling statistic: Los Angeles is the most densely populated city in America, with significantly more people per square mile than New York City or Chicago. Indeed, Los Angeles has developed a reputation for such bad traffic congestion, Bruegmann asserts, partly because road building has not kept up with the increasing population density.

If that analysis seems counterintuitive, it is not unique to Bruegmann. The Brookings Institution in 2001 reported 10 of the 15 densest metropolitan areas in the nation were in California, Nevada and Arizona. "The Western metro areas — whatever else their characteristic may be," Brookings reported, "are using less land to accommodate population growth than metro areas in any other part of the nation."

That was certainly true of Phoenix, according to a 2000 Morrison Institute study, which found the city's population density was increasing "from its core to its edges."

These density analyses, of course, raise questions about the growth debate in Arizona, including Tucson, in which sprawl typically has been blamed for widespread destruction of fragile and precious desert lands. If Arizona is growing so efficiently, isn't it possible that there was no way to avert the sprawl?

The debate about sprawl and its effects has been filled with other misconceptions, as Bruegmann notes, including analyses of sprawl's causes.

One common explanation is that sprawl is caused by white flight fueled by racism. Bruegmann dismisses that: "Although no one would deny that race has played a key role in many aspect of American life," Bruegmann writes, "it is significant that urban areas with small minority populations like Minneapolis have sprawled in much the same way as urban areas with large minority populations like Chicago. It is also the case that when they have become affluent enough to do so, African-Americans have been just as willing as their white counterparts to move out to the suburbs."

Another explanation is that the automobile spawned sprawl, but Bruegmann notes that people started moving outward from cities centuries before the automobile was invented. Automobiles certainly made sprawl easier by providing more mobility. But that doesn't mean the automobile created the impulse to move out from the center. Indeed, it may be no more logical to say that cars caused sprawl than it is to say that sprawl created the need for cars.

Even so, the 1950s saw the first of many attacks on automobiles. One argument heard in Tucson and elsewhere was that building new highways only induced more traffic. That led to the maxim, "We can't build our way out of congestion."

However, this increased traffic "was often just the result of many people using new roads to expand their choices in living, working and recreational environments," Bruegmann writes. The "inducement" argument reminds him of the Duke of Wellington's 19th century complaint that railroads "only encourage the common people to move about needlessly."

A related argument is that sprawl leads to automobile dependence, which in turn leads to congestion, longer commutes and more pollution. However, Bruegmann responds that this argument is "difficult to sustain in the face of data that show that commuting times in the United States did not increase very much during the entire period from the sixties to the eighties, even as cities declined dramatically in density." Indeed, he would argue the reverse: It is density, not sprawl, that leads to congestion.

There are reasons sprawl has persisted over the centuries: It allows people privacy and the ability to control their own surroundings by living in suburban, single-family dwellings. It enhances both personal and social mobility. And it extends choices to ordinary citizens that once were available only to the wealthy.

But Bruegmann, in his near embrace of free-market forces for land-use planning, ultimately fails to deal with the need to protect our natural and cultural resources for future generations. Phoenix and Tucson may be unusually efficient at accommodating growth, but that growth still consumes thousands of acres of desert each year.

Personally, I am caught in an emotional and intellectual bind. I understand the shrinking size of the average household creates a demand for additional housing, as does the influx of new people who want to live in such an attractive place as Tucson. But I bleed a little every time I see an acre of desert being bladed for a road, a store or a home.

Bruegmann provides little to help me or others to resolve that dilemma, though I can hope the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan with its allocation of land for different activities will prove to be a good answer for Tucson.

Even so, Bruegmann's analysis is valuable. It reveals that sprawl, which is seldom defined clearly, is much more complex than most of us have understood. Consequently, many attempts to combat sprawl have been simplistic.

"Most American anti-sprawl reformers," Bruegmann writes, "today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage interest deduction on the federal income tax. It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policies."

In an essay on Bruegmann's book in Governing magazine, Alan Ehrenhalt sounds a similar note: "Sprawl is largely a force of history and geography and not primarily a consequence of any policy of government or any conspiracy by developers."

Bruegmann also offers an important corrective on our tendency to see sprawl in moralistic terms. The decision whether to live in the inner city or a suburb is not a moral choice, though anti-sprawl advocates sometimes equate it to one. And people who live in what are often derisively called "seas of red tile roofs" are not inherently lacking in taste or cultural refinement.

The fight against sprawl too often has involved trying to force people to live their lives in ways they don't want — to rely on public transit when they would prefer the comfort and convenience of a car, or to live in high-density developments when surveys the world over show people prefer living in single-family homes.

Bruegmann's iconoclastic book helps us understand that such approaches cannot work.

Sprawl is the result, ultimately, of "the choices of millions of individuals and families about where and how they wanted to live," Bruegmann writes.

Consequently, the only workable solutions to sprawl are those that will cause millions of individuals and families to make different choices. That cannot be done through government or social force. It requires creating alternatives that people find attractive.