Stopping sprawl for the good of all: The case for civic environmentalism

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 28-43

  Dagger, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247460218     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9833.00163     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (28)

1. William A. Shutkin, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 15. As Shutkin acknowledges, Dewitt John seems to have coined the term "civic environmentalism," but John uses it, in a more technical sense than either Shutkin or I do, to denote a way of dealing with environmental problems that relies more on states, municipalities, and flexibility than on top-down regulation from the federal government.
2. See John, Civic Environmentalism: Alternatives to Regulation in States and Communities (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1984), esp. 7-18.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1983), 208.
4. On this point see Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Crown, 1997), esp. 130-32.
5. Ibid., citing Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), without page reference.
6. According to Robert Putnam, "traffic congestion has metastasized everywhere [in the United States]. In a study of sixty-eight urban areas. ., annual congestion-related delay per driver rose steadily from sixteen hours in 1982 to forty-five hours per driver in 1997." Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 213.
7. In 2001, using data from 1999, the Texas Transportation Institute reported that rush hour in these sixty-eight urban areas "has doubled in less than 20 years, increasing from nearly three hours (morning and evening combined) in 1982 to almost 6 hours in 1999." Moreover, the "cost of traffic congestion nationwide totaled $78 billion, representing the cost of 4.5 billion hours of extra travel time and 6.8 billion gallons of fuel wasted while sitting in traffic." See Texas Transportation Institute, 2001 Urban Mobility Study (http://mobility.tamu.edu/2001/news-release/May 7, 2001).
8. On the basis of national surveys conducted in the United States in 1972 and 1988, Glen Fuguitt and David Brown reached this conclusion: "if everyone were to live in the location that he or she preferred, the distribution of population would be different than current residence. In particular, there would probably be fewer people in large cities [i.e., with more than 50,000 residents] and more people near [i.e., within 30 miles of] large cities." G. V. Fuguitt and D. L. Brown, "Residential Preferences and Population Redistribution: 1972-1988," Demography 27 (November 1990): 592-93.
9. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (December 13, 1968): 1243-48.
10. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19.
11. Ibid., 214. Putnam's well-known claims about the decline of social capital and civic engagement in works published prior to Bowling Alone have been challenged by other scholars, notably Everett Carll Ladd, The Ladd Report (New York: Free Press, 1999).
12. On the tendency of affluence and racial homogeneity to depress civic participation, see also Eric Oliver, Democracy in Suburbia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 149-52.
13. See, e.g., Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
14. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
15. It also contributes to what Myron Orfield calls "the concentration effects of poverty" among the people left behind: "As neighborhoods become dominated by joblessness, [de facto] racial segregation, and single-parentage, they become isolated from middleclass society and the private economy. Individuals, particularly children, are deprived of local successful role models and connections to opportunity outside the neighborhood." Among other problems, those "who live in concentrated poverty are far more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, to drop out of high school, and to remain jobless than their counterparts in socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods." Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 18.
16. S. Verba and N. Nie, Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 233-47.
17. On this point, see Kay, Asphalt Nation, 327. For examples of antisprawl policies
18. see Shutkin, The Land That Could Be, chaps. 4-7.
19. See Fuguitt and Brown, "Residential Preferences and Population Redistribution."
20. W. Rybczynski, "Mysteries of the Mall," New York Review of Books 41 (July 14, 1994): 31-34, at 32.
21. Orfield, Metropolitics, 84.
22. All quotations in this paragraph are from Leon Eplan, "Atlanta: Planning, Budgeting, and Neighborhoods," in Personality, Politics, and Planning: How City Planners Work, ed. Anthony Catanese and W. Paul Farmer (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978), 41-42.
23. See, e.g., Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis;
24. James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996);
25. and Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point, 2000).
26. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation, 60, emphasis in original.
27. Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning, The Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy, and Community (Washington, D.C., and Covelo, Calif.: Island, 1997).
28. See also Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), in which the author holds that "the escapist nature of neo-traditionalist urban design may emit signals that the present is too unsavory; let's pretend it's not here and go back to the good ol' days. Such reluctance to embrace the present and happily anticipate the future inevitably contributes to an atmosphere of foreboding which casts a pall upon the quality of life at all levels, from the most intimate to the most public" (154).