Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape
In 1950, 74 percent of the population of metropolitan Denver lived within the city’s borders. Twenty years later, that figure had plummeted to 42 percent, as sprawling towns along the highways siphoned jobs and people from the central city. Pollution, largely a result of ballooning traffic, frequently formed a "brown cloud" over the Mile-High City. By the mid-1970s, Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm would be forced to warn that "Denver is in danger of becoming an endless Los Angeles in the Rockies." Denver is one of three municipalities that serve as case studies in Gutfreund’s sobering analysis of transportation policy in the United States. Gutfreund is not the first to argue that Washington—guided by the auto industry, influential land developers and an anti-urban bias among policymakers—effectively subsidized sprawl and traffic congestion by promoting roads. But Gutfreund neatly traces the deep roots of these policies and the ways they destabilized cities while saddling state and local governments with huge bills for highway construction and maintenance. A useful companion to Crabgrass Frontiers, the landmark study of suburbia by Gutfreund’s Columbia University colleague, Kenneth T. Jackson, this book demonstrates that the problem of sprawl is national in scope, and not just confined to such Sunbelt boomtowns as Houston and Atlanta. (The other two communities discussed are Middlebury, Vt., and Smyrna, Tenn.) Gutfreund’s prose style is somewhat pedestrian and occasionally he gets repetitive. But he does a nice job of introducing readers to his three municipalities without getting bogged down in the details of road projects that only locals would recognize. Coming in an era when more and more communities are examining the costs of sprawl and questioning their dependence on the automobile, this book could not be timelier.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.