Introduction
Urban planning is a dynamic profession that deals with improving the welfare of people and their communities by creating more equitable, convenient, efficient, healthful, sustainable, and attractive places for present and future generation. Planning enables businesses, citizens, and civic leaders play a significant role in creating communities that enhance people’s lives. Effective planning has the potential of creating communities that offer better choices for how and where people live. Good planning helps communities find the right balance of essential services and new development, innovative change, and environment protection. However, planners usually come across various issues when it comes to planning. Main issues faced by urban planning in the US include accommodating population growth, planning and funding priorities, getting cities the recognition and resources they want, and infrastructure. This paper discuses the issue of urban sprawl.
Urban Sprawl
Urban sprawl is the outspread of urban center towards less populated areas surrounding urban areas, although these areas will not serve as a better place to live ceaselessly, because what is a suburb today will soon change to urban neighborhood. As cities get bigger, they extend to rural areas in order to enable people access cheaper housing and space for a short duration. However, suburbs lack quality healthcare, education, and transportation. In America, urban sprawl into once unpopulated and rural areas has become a major challenge to modern life in America. For example, Los Angeles has a reputation as the most sprawled area in the world. Many Americans do not desire to live anywhere near Los Angles.
Most people move to suburbs because they offer homes in a quiet neighborhood, with low demographic density. This enables people to occupy large trucks of land for residential development. In addition to offering safety, suburbs are not stressing as compared to loving in cities. Children also enjoy the opportunity to feel freedom as they have enough space to play and move around. Since these areas are low demographic density, some areas have access to quality water. These developments also bring together businesses that depend on auto traffic such as gas stations and auto repair shops.
Expanding cities is a threat to swath of land the size of Germany, France, and Spain combined in less than twenty years, putting the world under even more environmental pressure. Cities are experiencing growth in order to accommodate the rising global population and as cities like California pursue fast economic growth (Alan et al., 2011). Eating up scarce agricultural land for suburban development has been a topic of major debate for some tome. Urban sprawl has continued without debate because cities and federal governments have been at the forefront of funding expanded road infrastructure, facilitating the suburban lifestyle. Availability of cheaper housing on the outskirts of cities has provided starter homes for eager homeowners. However, lack of attention to inner city areas has city centers unattractive places to live.
Urban sprawl is low density, automobile dependent development outside the area of service and employment areas. It is omnipresent, with its effects significantly affecting the quality of life in all regions of the United States, including both large cities and small towns. Urban sprawl is responsible for everything that negatively affects modern American lifestyle. These include development of McMansions, strip malls, big-box stores, the decline of downtowns, the loss of favorite countryside, traffic congestion, high gas consumption, SUVs, war in Iraq, and dependence on foreign oil. Without doubt, sprawl is bad and like expanding waistline, it is peddled around the world as another wastefulness and profligacy as a nation.
Reasons for urban sprawl in the United States
The major factor driving outward spread of cities is population growth. Population growth is a significant factor that influences sprawl, as growth in population culminates into other problems associated with urban growth (Abelairas-Etxebarria & Astorkiza, 2012). For example, population of Detroit grew remarkably fast in the last decade, resulting into urban sprawl. Population pressure results in urban sprawl as people move to less populated areas to look for space away from the congested cities.
Another factor driving urban sprawl is people searching for better life style because today, cities such as Los Angeles are heavily populated thereby making life more stressful (Wagner, 2008). Many people living in Los Angeles have moved to areas outside the city such as Pasadena in search of a quiet and peaceful environment, less polluted areas, decreased violence and traffic. In most cases, people move to places that can still allow them to drive to their original jobs in a less than half hour drive. However, as more and more people follow suite, the once peaceful and quiet place becomes crowded and stressful and the place they previously move from, as needs of people such as supermarkets, building, and supporting services are provide.
Reasons for concern
The American dream since the end of World War II has been defined as owning a house in the suburbs and two cars on the road. Sparked by a series state and federal government policies, including immense road construction projects, subsidies to buy homes provided by the GI Bill, and community planning designed around cars, Americans deserted the cities for serene environment in the suburban (Calthorpe & Fulton, 2011). Evidently, public spending has the potential of affecting individual decisions about where to live, work, and live. This trend has encouraged rapid transformation of forests and agricultural lands into housing developments and strip malls. Worse still, the rate of development has accelerated. According to the American Farmland Trust, more than 70 percent of prime farmland has become the pathway for rapid development.
Of late, buildings are increasingly replacing farmlands and forests. Approximately one kilometer wide and stretching from San Francisco to New York of land is lost to expansion of cities in the United States annually. Agricultural production cannot continue with increasing pressure on available arable land, which will eventually culminate into shortage of food supply. The United States has been able to feed its population for many decades, but with the increasing loss of land to urban sprawl, the nation will not be able to do so in the near future (Alan et al., 2011). As result, the United States will have to depend on other nations for food, and eventually the whole world will eventually experience famine. As such, measures must be put in place to amend the way things are conducted today in order to ensure continuity of human kind.
The major factor affecting urban sprawl is population growth in the Mid-Atlantic region. The increase in size of population increases the demand on the amount of land required to accommodate residential and commercial needs. For example, in Chesapeake alone, between 1950 and 1980, the percent of land used for commercial and residential purposes increased by approximately 180 percent while the population grew by about 50 percent. Current statistics in California in a six-month period indicates that about 5,000 people left Los Angeles; approximately 10,000 acres of farmlands and forests were lost; and city authorities issued 3,000 septic permits. Supposing these trends continue, California could use equal amount of land in the next 25 years as it has used in the entire history of the state (Chestney, 2012).
Similarly, development in Northern Virginia is expanding beyond areas serviced by public water suppliers. Particularly, the population of Loudon County has increased by approximately 150 percent from 57,000 in 1980 to more than 140,000 today, with land use shifting from rural to urban. Funnily enough, relevant authorities have not conducted any assessment on how urban sprawl affects aquifers and availability of groundwater.
In its progress, urban sprawl eats many acres of farmland and forests, wetlands and woodlands. In addition, it leaves vacant storefronts, boarded up houses, abandoned industrial sites, closed businesses, and traffic congestion stretching many miles out of urban centers. Currently, there are more than 700,000 kilometers of roads connecting urban areas within the Mid-Atlantic region. As a result, we suffer from increased dependence on fossil fuel, increased traffic congestion, increased dependence on fossil fuels, worsening water and air pollution, crowded schools, lost wetlands, destroyed wildlife habitat, increasing flooding, higher taxes, and dying city centers.
Additionally, urban sprawl is creating unseen debt of unfunded services and infrastructure, urban decay, social dysfunction, and environmental dilapidation. Despite the fact that the county of Prince William has the highest rate for property tax rate, the county experiences high cost when it comes to providing services to new developments, such that the county currently has a deficit of $1,688 annually for every new house built (Abelairas-Etxebarria & Astorkiza, 2012). Another equally important problem is the loss of community as the number of people visiting each other and mutual assistance among neighbor reduces. This becomes hard because it is possible for a person living on a 5-acre land to live for years without ever knowing their neighbors.
Urban sprawl provides better housing opportunities for immigrants and poorer people because the houses are cheap. This will consequently make houses in the city cheaper. Children also have more freedom because suburbs have larger space and more secure. However, the community becomes less united as houses are far apart. It also reduces the time spent at home as traffic increases and people drive longer distances. In addition, schools in suburbs get crowded as the rate of people moving out of cities exceeds the rate of development. For example, there are inadequate schools for kids living in Chicago. As size of farmland reduces drastically, food gets more scarce and expensive. The increased pollution around major cities and towns in the United States will have health implications on the present and future generation. People are development health problems such as cancer that result due to air pollution.
As a result, America is running out of greener pastures and majority of Americans believe that urban sprawl is the fastest growing threat to their quality of life and natural environment. People have started questioning the acumen of expanding faster than infrastructure can support or service. Additionally, many are starting to recognize that many years of road construction have yet to and may never lessen traffic congestion. Those who previously hailed development now consider the associated cost such as farmland not worth the benefits of a new strip mall.
Recommendations for urban planning
I would propose to federal and state government of the US to come up with strategies to solve problems associated with urban sprawl. Such would include enacting policies that limit the size of land that can be used build depending original core of the city. Additionally, they should establish a rough estimate of demographic density of the whole country to estimate the average size of land suitable for private development. City plans should contain detailed demographic profiles for the country to help in planning for developing supporting facilities and services to the whole population. Another option that the US should consider is taking actions similar to that taken by China to control birth rate (Abelairas-Etxebarria & Astorkiza, 2012). This would help then reduce the number of people spreading out of cities to seek land for new developments.
Other than giving the government, the responsibility of checking urban sprawl, private organizations and individuals should create awareness about urban sprawl and its impact in order to enable people understand and see into the future what life would be then if the trend continued. Organizing events such as urban sprawl awareness campaigns would help educate people on the long-term effects of urban sprawl.
Solutions
There are solutions to urban sprawl in the US and the entire world, and a solution to this problem would be birth control, nut this could not be adequate as people are not willing to stop making babies. People should also try to change the way they think as people have always held the belief that the bigger the better. Americans live living in lush houses covering more than 5 acres of land and driving SUVs that consume more fuel leading to more air population and increasing US dependence on crude oil. As a means of changing this trend, I would encourage not to move more than ten miles away from the city. However, this would be possible if more people could work from home via computer and make purchases online. This is a possibility because technology has evolved. This would reduce air pollution and fuel consumption as well as reduce traffic congestion.
Urban planners should encourage and implement efficient use of land, as it would enable many people to fit in the same area. City planners should develop plans that allows for accommodation of people within the cities as well as reducing the number of people moving out of the cities into forests and farmland. In line with this, the government should designate areas for private developments to reserve areas for agriculture, forests, and attractions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, urban sprawl is good to some point, but after reaching this point, urban sprawl become a tragedy to all facets of society including environmental, social, political, economic impacts. Once they came into place, these impacts grow at fast speed. As such, today’s society should be proactive and prevent urban sprawl if they do not want to see a very unpleasant future. Governments should conduct critical assessments to determine the availability of enough safe water and aquifers to support suburban development now and in the future. Urban planning agencies should also conduct reviews of zoning laws and local land-use to determine their adequacy to protect natural resource and landscape.
References:
Abelairas-Etxebarria, P., & Astorkiza, I. (2012). Are land use policies preserving farmland from urban sprawl? Review of European Studies, 4(5), 24-29. doi:10.5539/res.v4n5p24
Alan et al. (2011). Governance and Opportunity in Metropolitan America. National Academy Press.
Calthorpe, P. & Fulton, W. B. (2011). The Regional City: planning for the end of sprawl. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
Chestney, N. (27 Mar. 2012). Sprawling cities pressure environment, planning. Reuters. Available from http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/27/us-cities-climate-idUSBRE82Q0K120120327
Wagner, N. L. (2008). Urbanization: 21st century issues and challenges. Hauppauge, New York: Nova Publishers.
