Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
7.1. Urban sprawl
In 1947, the developer Levitt & Sons purchased a potato field on Long Island,
40 km from Manhattan, to build a new suburb of 17,500 houses. This new, suburban
community was incorporated into a city of 82,000 inhabitants. The concept was not
completely new. Llewellin Park (New York, 1853) was considered to be the original
prototype of the garden city for upper-middle-class commuters, and which was made
accessible by railways [JAK 85]. Yet the founding of Levittown symbolizes the
extent of the impact that the postwar American way of life ideal had on the
American city. Starting in the 1930s, the New Deal inaugurated fiscal policies to
support home ownership (making loan interest tax deductible) and recovery
programs that backed major construction projects, including the development of
highway infrastructures. It was at this time that the models of suburban planning
were designed: Broadacre City, by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935, and Democracity at
the 1939 Universal Exhibition in New York, supported by General Motors. The
model at the 1939 exhibition was based on a spread out city with a rural look (
Rus in
Urbe
2
) with only individual housing and a grid of highways. In this city, crime,
health risks, and the worn-down housing of industrial cities would be gone forever.
It was only in the prosperous years of the postwar period, however, that these
models came to be truly reflected in the American city.
Buying a big, new, stand-alone house with a double garage, built by a private
developer, on the outskirts of the city, became more desirable than buying an old
apartment in town, or, even worse, renting one. At the same time, the economic
strategy of the neo-Keynesian government encouraged this development for
economic growth through a program of public infrastructures, support for mortgage
loans, tax deductions for borrowers, and the maintenance of very low tax levels on
fuel. In addition, the federal program for the construction of free highways
(interstate freeways), initiated in 1956, facilitated the extension of shuttle routes and
the accessibility of business districts by car. This policy was encouraged by intense
lobbying from the automobile and oil industries. Besides these economic factors,
urban sprawl allowed middle-class, white neighborhoods to separate from their
black neighbors when the struggle for civil rights pushed racial tensions to their
peak. In the late 1960s, the American city was already a spread out city, pushing
municipal administrations to a crisis situation. Despite rising criticism (the
emergence of New Urbanism), the process of urban sprawl did not slow down until
the burst of the housing bubble in 2006 (see Table 7.1).
2
. Countryside within the city.
