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Roots of Sprawl Book Selections
go to: Sprawl Solutions Book Selections
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Most of the books listed here can be ordered through independent booksellers. Support this effort by clicking on the logo and searching for titles you may be interested in.
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Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
by Kenneth T. Jackson
Oxford University Press, 1987
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Reviews of book:
"With a masterly command of the literature on the subject, Jackson presents a sweeping picture of one of the most significant migrations in American history. ... Though the information and the perspective are not new, [this] is a landmark volume." -- Jon C. Teaford - The Journal of American History
"Among the many interpretations, attacks, sociological reviews and other accounts of surburbia's spread since 1945, Mr. Jackson's stands out as the most comprehensive" -- Grady Clay, NY Times Book Review
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Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life
by Tom Lewis
Viking Penguin (March 1999)
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Review of book:
"This brightly written history of the U.S. federal highway program is like the annual report of a successful company that has had grim second thoughts. The first half recounts progress made, while the second suggests that the good news is not quite what it seems. Lewis begins with Thomas Harris MacDonald, who ... was to federal highway construction what J. Edgar Hoover was to law enforcement. The high points here include the building of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which set the pattern for 20th-century toll roads, and the maneuvering leading up to the passage of the 1956 law establishing the Interstate Highway System. Lewis also touches on such matters as the parkways of the 1930s, the education of civil engineers and the design of highway signs. With a successful late-1960s revolt by New Orleans preservationists against a highway through the French Quarter, Lewis begins to relate the darker side of road building and its lobbyists, which led to the malling of the landscape." -- review from Publishers Weekly
From the Editor of the PlannersWeb: The Interstate Highway System is one of the 10 key "events that shaped the 20th century American city" cited by planning historian Larry Gerckens in "Ten Events that Shaped the 20th Century American City," an article published in the Spring 1998 issue of the Planning Commissioners Journal (this article can be ordered and downloaded online).
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Expanding the American Dream : Building and Rebuilding Levittown
by Barbara M. Kelly
State University of New York Press, 1993
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Review of book:
"[Levittown is] the symbol for mass suburbia, but Kelly's careful and original treatment soon presents us with a reality far different from the symbol.Unlike previous writers who have concentrated on the initial mass-production process that enabled Levitt and Sons to build 17,500 houses between 1947 and 1951, Kelly documents what she calls the 'rebuilding' of Levittown, the substantial alterations that reshaped virtually all the houses. Far from embodying the 'cookie-cutter conformity' of the suburban myth, Levittown in Kelly's interpretation represents a remarkable example of people creating a varied and personalized domestic environment to meet their changing needs. ... Kelly has done detailed analyses of many of these alterations, which prove to be a wonderful source for understanding the transformation of suburban middle-class life after 1950." -- review by Robert Fishman, from The Journal of American History
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Geography of Nowhere: The Rise & Decline of America's Man Made Landscapes
by James Howard Kunstler
Simon & Schuster, 1993
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Review of book:
"This is a funny, angry, colossally important tour of our built landscape, our human ecology. James Howard Kunstler explains just how American towns turned into car-dependent and sterile suburbs -- and he explains how they might be turned back again into the kind of yeasty and engaged communities we all yearn for." -- Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature.
From the Editor of the PlannersWeb: The Geography of Nowhere was one of the top 10 planning books in our Fall 1999 online readers survey.
Kunstler's article, How to Mess Up a Town, from the Winter 1995 issue of the Planning Commissioners Journal is available on the PlannersWeb.
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Review of book:
"Kunstler hits the ground running in this sequel to his highly acclaimed Geography of Nowhere, which assailed in no uncertain terms the consumer wasteland that Americans now habitate. As in his previous work, Kunstler takes as his point of departure the insidious rise of the automobile as the first blow to the disintegration of our communities and moves toward proposals for restoring the civic dimension to our lives. He writes eloquently of the bitter legacy of slavery in forging today's urban black underclass and takes on the thorny, unsexy issues of zoning and property taxes. Kunstler has embraced the progressive philosophy of the "new urbanism," characterized by its sensitivity to building to human scale and demonstrated most effectively in the experiment of Seaside, Florida, designed by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Adres Duany. His text offers numerous analyses of urban form via diagrams, graphs, and charts, e.g., how a street should be designed. His book is a jolly rant of fiercely held personal convictions that is intended to provoke his readers to action. An essential purchase." -- Thomas P.R. Nugent, Library Journal
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