For many of us, the word “sprawl” conjures up images of low-density housing, car-dependent lifestyles, rambling office parks and big-box stores encroaching on our farms, forests and open spaces.
It’s more complicated than that, of course, and academics have coined catchphrases for the multiple dimensions of sprawl: slurbs and zoomburbs, exopolises and edge cities. They have discovered megacounties and freeway districts and coined countless acronyms like LULU (“locally unwanted land use”); BANANA (“build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything”); NOPE (“not on planet Earth”); and the ever-prevalent NIMBY (“not in my backyard”).
Even regions take on whole new names, like “Fort Greeland” referring to the Fort Collins, Loveland and Greeley urban/suburban agglomeration.
Those of us who study sprawl find ourselves so entangled in our subject matter that we are increasingly becoming like sprawl itself: Our expansive new vocabulary verges on becoming awkward, and our ongoing attempts to orient ourselves in the rapidly transforming landscape have become rather disoriented.
In the American West, where population pressures have urban centers bursting at the seams, grappling with the changing urban form is a particularly daunting challenge. Due to our aridity, land-ownership patterns and topography, we can add to the euphemisms terms like “checkerboard annexation,” “jigsaw jurisdiction” and “gateway getaway.”
Our efforts to combat urban sprawl in places like Missoula, Mont., have created “duplex dilemmas” where junky infill development threatens the community character and extending services to those same duplexes on the fringe of the city threatens the community pocketbook.
It should come as no surprise that most citizens are completely bewildered by the growth that surrounds them. Most of us remain mystified by the inevitable interaction of our push to mix urban lifestyles with a fervent desire to walk out our back doors into the Wild West.
“Twice I have bought a house on the edge of town, hoping to enjoy the desert for a long time,” said Hal Rothman, history professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “Each time I found myself downtown.”
In researching the spatial dimensions of sprawl in the Mountain West, our best tools for understanding urban forms – aerial photography, geographic information systems mapping and the drawings of landscape architects – can inspire meaningful dialogue about the proper relationship between the built and natural environments. By making these tools more widely available to the public, from the couch or café, we can begin to combat our confusion with online mapping projects and virtual community build-out scenarios.
With these tools at our disposal, we may establish the foundation we need to begin charting and understanding the impacts of growth in our communities. But if we’re to effectively face the future of growth, broad geographic overlays and aerial cul-de-sac photos obviously aren’t the whole answer.
Somehow we must reconcile the piecemeal governance and decisionmaking capacities of town, city and county governments. Faced with the challenge of managing growth, too often the incentives for governments to minimize expansion and public service costs conflict with the incentives they face in trying to maximize expanding development and thus tax revenues.
Hope may be on the horizon in the private sector, where developers have learned that preserving open space and natural amenities can significantly improve their bottom lines. Developers such as Peter O’Neill of Boise have come to realize that enhancing trout streams in an urban environment for spawning can create a lure for the luxury market. Other developers have begun to grasp that open space is an affordable amenity. Open space and wildlife corridors integrated into a clustered residential development can give Western consumers exactly what they want at an affordable price: the ability to walk out their back door into the scenic vistas and grandeur of the American West.
For the private sector to actively provide these amenities, we need to send a clear signal about our growth preferences. While we wrestle with what to call growth and how to comprehend it, developers may continue doing things we ultimately don’t want.
What will be our legacy? When we can talk about sprawl beyond just characterizing the forms it has paved around us, we may be positioned to speak in a more constructive way about the future of growth in our urban areas. When we start talking about “fly-fishing frontages” and neighborhood “eco-environs,” we’ll have started a more productive conversation about growth in the American West.
The 2005 Colorado College State of the Rockies Report Card (www.coloradocollege.edu/stateoftherockies) will be presented April 10-14 at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Patrick Holmes is a project researcher and former program coordinator for Colorado College’s State of the
Rockies Project.
