There’s a growing body of academic writing that suggests sprawl isn’t all that bad, and in fact maybe a good and necessary thing. Joe Berridge’s review of William Bogart’s book Don’t Call It Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the 21st Century could just as easily have been a review of Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History, since both argue confidently the same inevitability of low-density single-use development on the city fringe (“Suburbia Forever,” September 2007).
While he doesn’t use the information to challenge Bogart’s arguments, Berridge does refer to the fact that densities in Canadian cities are double those in America: all sprawl is not the same. And he admits that the Toronto urban area is a “different and, frankly, better city form” than can be found south of the border: sprawl is certainly not an inevitable modernism as his review implies. As for the high cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure needed for low-density development—well, it doesn’t get men- tioned very often by those who justify sprawl as an expression of personal freedom largely funded by the public bodies those cheerleaders despise.
The Ontario government’s plan for the Greater Toronto Area, Places to Grow — Better Places, Brighter Future: Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe may seem like a reasonable strategy to restrain sprawl for Berridge and others, but as Tony Coombes of the Neptis Foundation has pointed out, the plan assumes that sprawl as we know it will be able to continue in the Greater Toronto Area for about 25 years, and the densification targets it sets are ones that most municipalities have exceeded for the past decade. As Coombes says, the targets are “unambitious.”
Why has Toronto done better than American cities—although clearly not enough—at restraining sprawl? How can those positive factors be strengthened and enhanced to produce a more efficient and productive urban form? Those are the key questions that need to be answered rather than our either pretending there’s no problem or patting ourselves on the back for the limited progress that has been made.
John Sewell
Toronto, Ontario
