2008
University of Oklahoma Press
Sprawl is unwise, particularly when it destroys a desert.
Deserts are critical to the health of the planet because they regulate its temperature. They are also vital as home to plants and animals found nowhere else. And they are delicate, with a wagon trail remaining visible a century after the wagon has passed, its passengers turned to dust. Rapid development of the Sonoran Desert, the replacement of an age-old ecosystem by standard suburbs with standard houses and standard non-native grass lawns and a greatly increased water consumption – this is sprawl with implications not only for the desert environment but for the planet’s well being. Given the criticality of the desert ecosystem to the health of the planet, why do Americans almost compulsively impose an inappropriate suburbia on this fragile environment?
According to Schipper, a sociologist, the imposition of wetland values on the desert environment is a result of social imperatives that drive sprawl. The author notes that there are many of these imperatives, and she lists several. However, she discusses only the top five, each of which gets a chapter in this relatively short work. Americans emphasize rational decision making, have a unique perception of space and time, and emphasize rights over responsibilities. Americans also have bought into a consumerism that values the suburban dream home over a more compact urban one, and find that dream reinforced by shrewd marketing. In combination, these five characteristics produce neglect of the inner cities except as places to visit, an overwhelming migration of population to formerly rural or natural areas, and suburbs everywhere. Suburbia has become the dominant locus of American life. Once the imperatives are understood, then it becomes possible to consider whether this approach to development is what we really want.
The American imperative seems to be to grow or die, and Americans bring this ethos to even the most fragile of environments. Perhaps because progress in the American tradition is linear, the impulse to grow or die normally doesn’t mean growing up; rather it entails growing out. Rather than skyscrapers to call home, Americans must have stand-alone dwellings surrounded by the maximum possible expanse of greenery. Even those who seek to escape the grow-or-die America by moving to the desert bring their worship of green space to the areas to which they escape. Bringing the water-rich approach to the desert southwest has resulted in sprawl and waste.
This book deals with suburban sprawl, particularly in the Sonoran Desert home of Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States, increasing over 3 percent in 2006. Suburban sprawl absorbs 2 million acres of land a year, 228 acres per hour, both farm and desert, and creates serious alterations in the natural environment. Even when the environmentalists are able to slow sprawl in one area, the city merely sprawls around the victors, leaving them stranded within the amoeba that conquers all in its path.
The author examines Cave Creek, a community that waged a successful environmental effort in 1996 to halt development, and an Indian reservation. She finds that the environmentalists won an irrelevant victory at Cave Creek, locking their tiny part of the desert into non-sprawl development as the rest of the desert disappeared under standard housing developments on the other hand. Her study of the Pima-Maricopa reservation leads to the conclusion that the Pima Indians have adapted to the encroachment of Phoenix to some extent, but they have also retained their view of the land as sacred, even as they have opened areas to development; they are responsible compromisers, aware that time does not stop just because we would have it that way. The author also takes the opportunity in this context to discuss Hopi rejection of power lines in favor of solar energy because the former alter the environmental energy negatively.
Schipper also interviewed in several metropolitan planned communities. And she treats the rising eco-community movement sympathetically even if it is impractical for large scale use and successful only when limited to a handful of residents.
She cites the appropriate scholarly works, discussing the impossibility of an observer not affecting the observed, talking about the pluses and minuses of suburbs in general, and covers an impressive array of numbers to show the magnitude of the change (and the relatively small area taken by development, a number used by developers to justify their promotion of sprawl.) An interesting section discusses her venture into a tropical-themed restaurant, awash in water and tropical fauna and flora, an oasis as it were in the middle of the desert.
Rather than a scholarly exploration with graphs and charts and extensive secondary research on top of exhaustive archival work, the study comes closer to a personal essay, extended into a short monograph, developing the author’s sympathies and concerns rather than detailing the evolution of Phoenix and its expansion into the desert. The note on methodology does indicate that she did the appropriate sociological groundwork, interviewing residents of the areas she studied and such. And she does indicate up front that her intent is to give impressions rather than a fixed portrait of a moment that’s gone even as she records it.
Despite being a worked-over dissertation, parts of which have previously appeared elsewhere, this small work adds to the body of knowledge about sprawl, what causes it more than what stops it, and it leaves more questions than answers. The author writes with grace and humor, and the volume is profusely illustrated, so overall it is a good effort, easy to read while leaving much to think about. It should serve nicely as an introduction to the sociology of sprawl, an appetizer that leads the concerned reader to pursue the full course. Beyond that, this small book should serve as a reminder that it is possible to be scholarly without spending 600 pages or more of jargon in the pursuit of obscurity. If not more of us would be so astute.
North America 
