John Hennessy III,
P.E.
Every 2.5 minutes, the American West loses a football field worth of natural area to human development. This project maps a rapidly changing landscape, explores what is being lost, and profiles a new movement for conservation that is gaining ground.
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Episode 4 in the Strong Towns Curbside Chat series, this video illustrates the potential to redevelop aging cities, along with the dangers of sprawl.
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What is urban sprawl? In this 3-minute history of urban form, Ryan Gravel, Senior Urban Designer at Perkins+Will in Atlanta, explores the cultural motivations for today’s sprawl, then connects the dots to predict a hopeful future for our cities.
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DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED ECOLOGY
NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY
Cities are expanding, and as they do urban sprawl–low-density urban development outside the urban core–is expanding even more rapidly. In some regions, expansion of suburban habitats as a result of shifts to automobile-dependent living has led to increases in the urban footprint even where populations have not shown large increases. Urban sprawl increases the connectivity among urban habitats while simultaneously fragmenting non-urban habitats such as forests and grasslands. These changes have a variety of effects on species and ecosystems, including impacts to water pollution, disturbance dynamics, local climate, and predator-prey relationships. Urban sprawl will also, almost certainly, influence the ability of species to respond to climate change, in as much as it creates barriers to the movement of species that cannot survive in cities and corridors for those who can. Knowledge about the potential future character of urban sprawl is thus useful to a variety of stakeholders, including resource managers, conservation organizations, and urban planners.
SMART GROWTH AMERICA
Some places in the United States are sprawling out and some places are building in compact, connected ways. The difference between these two strategies affects the lives of millions of Americans.
INFRA STORIES YOU SHOULDN’T MISS!
San Bernardino, California: Divided No More
Miami Transportation Planners Light the Way
Big Energy Buildings Go Greener
Sprucing Up the Waiting Game
Atlanta Snowstorm Strands Drivers
SMART GROWTH AMERICA
Local governments across the country have compared development strategies to understand their impact on municipal finances. These studies generally compare two or more different development scenarios, and help local leaders make informed decisions about new development based on the costs or revenues associated with them.
by Joseph Minizozzi
This article first appeared in Planetizen.
Are cities across the country acting negligently in ignoring the property tax implications of different development types? Joseph Minicozzi thinks so, and he’s done the math to prove it.
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