A01=Robert Bruegmann
aesthetics
architecture
atlanta
Author_Robert Bruegmann
britain
Category=GTP
Category=JBSD
Category=RPC
city
development
environment
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
geography
growth
history
industrial
land use
london
los angeles
metropolitan
mobility
nonfiction
office parks
paris
place
planning
privacy
resort
rome
rural
settlement
sprawl
subdivisions
suburban
suburbia
superhighways
urban
wealth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226076904
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2005
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize. In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers.
Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful. The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, "Sprawl" offers a completely new vision of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that "in its immense complexity and constant change, the city - whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawling in suburbia, or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles - is the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind."
Robert Bruegmann is chair of and professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as professor in the School of Architecture and the Program in Urban Planning. His many books include The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
