Yet a growing number of people are realizing that the urban development pattern itself is part of the problem - and also part of the solution.
Traditional towns have coherent, well-defined boundaries and are surrounded by rural areas.
This alternative to sprawl has a number of advantages, but until recently, little was known about the relationship between a traditional development pattern and urban runoff. Last fall, the Charleston Harbor Project, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and administered by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, began a study to compare the water quality impacts of sprawl and the traditional town alternative. The research team was an eclectic group of architects, local government planners, private and public sector engineers, state regulators, resource managers and citizens. The researchers tested the hypothesis that traditional town development generates less total runoff than sprawl because it disturbs less land. First, the team designed two prototype developments - one representing sprawl and one representing the traditional town.