| | Sprawltown:
Looking for the City on Its Edges,
by Richard Ingersoll.
In this short book on the all-too-popular
subject of sprawl, Richard Ingersoll adopts a critical stance
not towards its existence but towards its future. Five chapters
propose various ways of looking at the peripheral condition
that is now ubiquitous in America and much of the rest of
the Modern world: sprawl as its own ecology; the relationship
between tourism and terrorism; "Jump-cut Urbanism",
or a cinematic view of the condition; and the artistic view
of infrastructure. Each chapter sticks to a consistent outline
of stating a problem, touching on personalities in the past
that tackled the problem, and then proposing ways of improving
sprawl through an appropriate tactic. This last is becoming
a common approach as architects and planners realize that
sprawl is an inevitable condition that can't be abated by
their criticism and grumblings, though the author acknowledges
that environmental factors, more than human, will push us
to change our ways. What that future may be is hinted in
the book's title, where instead of a just an unfocused visual
frame out our car window (sprawl), we might just see sprawl
turn into something with roots (town), perhaps evolving
a new entity that even early planners couldn't foresee.
. . or . . 
|
