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National
Professor Defines Un-Smart Growth Terms in ''A Field Guide to Sprawl''
''Sprawl is low-density, scattered, automobile-dependent development'' created in a ''political economy organized around unsustainable growth,'' said Yale University Professor Dolores Hayden as she narrated 160 years of American suburban history at a packed University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning forum in Albuquerque, quoting data from her incoming book, ''A Field Guide to Sprawl.''
The book, she promised, will help the public clarify sprawl aspects with ''a vocabulary that's accessible to every American citizen -- a vocabulary of placelessness.''
Far from being anti-suburban, notes Albuquerque Tribune reporter Frank Zoretich, the Yale professor pointed out that too often developers say ''build it, make your money and drive away,'' which leaves a messy landscape, with architecture that reflects only commercial interests.
Accordingly, the writer cites some of the key terms for her sprawl vocabulary. A boomburg and a zoomburg are suburbs growing fast and even faster. Snout houses point their garages toward the street, and a series of them produces a snoutscape. A power center is a collection of big-box stores that ''destroy shopping malls as well as main streets,'' while a stretch mall describes a power center a few miles long. Edge nodes are commercial and office centers ''surrounded by fast food and discount stores'' and parking lots, with no residential or pedestrian space. Ground cover is cheap buildings, like self-storage facilities, that will be razed when more profitable land use is found. Litter-on-a-stick is advertising boards, and putting parsley around the pig is minimal landscaping to make buildings or whole subdivisions somewhat more attractive. -- Albuquerque Tribune
3/23/2004
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