Word: sprawl
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They're finding eager pioneers among couples like Amanda and Michael Hale. The Hales think sprawl is too kind a word for conditions they rejected around Atlanta. They call it suburban blight, a strip-malled world void of rituals like walking to a store or enjoying an attractive building. "We want our four children to grow up in a community, not at a highway exit," says Amanda, 33, a nurse. Michael, 34, director of a charter school in Durham, N.C., says their yen to escape grew urgent this year as alienated kids shot up suburban schools in Colorado and Georgia...
...this sounds too much like Mayberry to be practical, think again. The environmental and cultural damage caused by sprawl has become an issue in the presidential campaign. And the idea behind Southern Village--traditional neighborhood development, or TND--could reshape the outskirts of cities from North Carolina to Oregon. "I've had to relearn everything we've forgotten since World War II," says D.R. Bryan, developer of Southern Village. "But I do want to start building communities for people instead of for cars...
...Today more than 100 are up and running, with an additional 200 on the drawing board. The movement's journal, the New Urban News, says investment in them has nearly doubled, from $1.2 billion in 1997 to $2.1 billion last year. Moreover, local planning boards in sprawl-plagued areas like Miami's Dade County are creating zones dedicated solely to such development...
First of all, Cambridge is not your average urban sprawl. Green, shady oases like Harvard Yard, Radcliffe Yard, JFK Park at the Kennedy School and the Cambridge Common (only during day-light hours) offer plenty of space for frisbee games, touch-football and soccer...
Phoenix businessman Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state senator, makes poetry of the west side's Los Angelized sprawl. "It's a place with no edges. It bleeds in and out of industrial and residential developments, and there's a creeping invisibility--an anonymity." The weak sense of community makes the area all the harder to police. And there is ethnic fragmentation as long-established Hispanics see new Mexican immigrants moving in next door, calling south of the border for the relatives and parking the truck on the sidewalk...