20 The Challenge of Urban Sprawl Thad Williamson, David Imbroscio, and Gar Alperovitz The growth of suburbs has been one of the most important features of cities since the 1950s. Early studies documented the negative effects of suburbaniza- tion on central cities, such as declining jobs, dwindling tax bases, increasingly expensive services, property abandonment, and the loss of the middle class. More recently, studies have shown that continued growth of the suburbs may create problems for suburban communities themselves. Thad Williamson, David Imbroscio, and Gar Alperovitz show that unplanned suburban growth (‘‘sprawl’’) negatively affects the quality of life, hurts the environment, wastes money and land, and hurts small businesses. They review a number of policy initiatives to discourage future sprawl and to address the economic, social, and environmental costs of existing sprawl. The third aspect of the triple threat to community in the United States consists of the complex of issues pertaining to spatial development and land use, usually connoted by the term sprawl. [The two aspects discussed previously are globaliza- tion and the mobility of capital. – Ed.] Sprawl refers both to the fact of continuing outward development on the perimeters of metropolitan areas and to the specific form such development has taken, namely, construction of freeways, strip malls, and other car-centered uses of space. A recent Brookings Institution analysis of data from the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Inventory found that between 1982 and 1997 the rate of outward land expan- sion outpaced population increases in 264 of the 281 metropolitan areas they examined. Williamson, Thad, David Imbroscio, and Gar Alperovitz, ‘‘The Challenge of Urban Sprawl.’’ From Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 71–85, 89–98, notes. Copyright # 2002 from Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era by Thad Williamson, David Imbroscio, and Gar Alperovitz. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Cities and Society Edited by Nancy Kleniewski Copyright © 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd