Abstract
Cities are living organisms. They grow, flourish, wither, and sometimes die. Throughout history, once-robust cities have reached points of economic obsolescence and have declined. Some vanish altogether, like Babylon and Ur. Others, like Venice, become essentially museums of themselves. Some survive, but shrink dramatically—like Detroit or St. Louis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Richard C. Longworth, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009).
- 2.
Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 3.
William deBuys, “Phoenix’s Too Hot Future,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2013.
- 4.
Zack Canepari, “Essay: A Planet of Suburbs, #3 Phoenix,” Economist, December 6, 2014.
- 5.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
- 6.
The “concentration and dispersal” narrative draws heavily on Grady Gammage Jr., Phoenix in Perspective (Phoenix, AZ: Herberger Center for Design Excellence, Arizona State University, 1999).
- 7.
Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).
- 8.
“A Suburban World,” Economist, December 6, 2014, 20.
- 9.
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985).
- 10.
Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (London: Portfolio, 2013). Continuing suburban trends are chronicled in many sources. See, e.g.: Emily Badger, “New Census Data: Americans Are Returning to the Far-Flung Suburbs,” Work Blog, Washington Post, August 31, 2015.
- 11.
James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century (New York: Touchstone Press, 1998).
- 12.
See, e.g.: Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); see also: Joel Kotkin, The New Geography (New York: Random House, 2000) and especially Kotkin’s website, Newgeography.com.
- 13.
William Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
- 14.
Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).
- 15.
The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (“Brundtland Report”) (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).
- 16.
Simon Bell and Stephen Morse, Measuring Sustainability: Learning from Doing (London: Routledge, 2003).
- 17.
Richard Lawson, “The Worst 50 States in America: The Final Five,” posted August 26, 2011, http://gawker.com/5834800/the-worst-50-states-in-america-the-final-five.
- 18.
Sustainlane.com city rankings 2008. The sustainlane.com rankings appear to have disappeared after 2008. Their rankings appeared from 2005 to 2008.
- 19.
See: “Green City Index,” Siemens, October 2015, http://www.siemens.com/entry/cc/en/greencityindex.htm.
- 20.
Reid Ewing, Rolf Pendall, and Don Chen, “Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact,” Smart Growth America, www.smartgrowthamerica.org, 2002.
- 21.
Tetratech, “Climate Change, Water, and Risk: Current Water Demands Are Not Sustainable,” National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/watersustainability/files/WaterRisk.pdf, July 2010.
- 22.
Kate Brown and Cynthia Parpa, “Resilient Cities Research Report,” Grosvenor, April 8, 2014, http://www.grosvenor.com/news-views-research/research/2014/resilient%20cities%20research%20report/.
- 23.
Kent E. Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American Cities (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 20.
- 24.
Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, October 2014).
- 25.
Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously, 19.
- 26.
Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously, 19, citing William E. Rees, “Is ‘Sustainable City’ an Oxymoron?,” Local Environment, 2:3 (London: Routledge, 1997), 303–10.
- 27.
Ronald Hansen, Arizona Republic, “Metro Phoenix May Be Missing the Bus,” November 10, 2013. The listed cities are Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, and Seattle.
- 28.
See Portney, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously, chapter 2, 36–87.
- 29.
Randy Rodgers, “Will Vegas Be the First ‘Net-Zero’ City in America?,” Sustainable City Network.com, April 3, 2013.
- 30.
Ross, Bird on Fire, 15.
- 31.
Ibid.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Grady Gammage Jr.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gammage, G. (2016). Suburbs, Sprawl, and Sustainability. In: The Future of the Suburban City. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-624-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-624-0_1
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-61091-224-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-624-0
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)