A Field Guide to Sprawl

A Field Guide to Sprawlwas selected by the urban web site Planetizen for its list of "Top Ten Books in Urban Studies" and by Discovermagazine for its list of "Top 20 Books in Science." Features on the book appeared in The New York Timesand the Boston Globe.

Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define. This concise book engages its meaning, explains common building patterns, and illustrates the visual culture of sprawl. Seventy-five stunning color aerial photographs, each paired with a definition, convey the impact of excessive development. This "engagingly organized and splendidly photographed" (Wall Street Journal) book provides the verbal and visual vocabulary needed by professionals, public officials, and citizens to critique uncontrolled growth in the American landscape.

"A mere glance through the pages of this book offers a quick education about the excesses of the recently built environment. By its very nature, sprawl is hard to identify and track, but Hayden, a Yale professor of architecture and American studies, provides a combination of informed but breezy text and 75 large, crisp color images that greatly simplify the task of 'decoding everyday American landscapes.' Organized alphabetically, with a big two-page spread for each entry, the book moves from 'alligator' (an investment that 'eats' cash flow, represented here by the vast and ghostly grid of an unbuilt New Mexico suburb) to 'zoomburb' (a suburb on steroids, illustrated here by Arizona's spiraling Sun City). Along the way, the reader comes to the depressing understanding that troubling phenomena one might have thought strictly local or temporary — for instance, houses where the garage is the dominant projecting feature — are common enough to have acquired names, in this case 'snout house.' But more than a set of colorful terms — all of which, from 'ball pork' to 'parsley round the pig' are carefully sourced — this book is a concise guide to not only sprawl itself but to the powerful political and financial forces that sustain it. If the book has one problematic aspect, it is that Wark's aerial photographs are often so vividly beautiful that they risk aestheticizing their often grim subjects — but their seductive quality serves to draw the viewer into Hayden's passionately sustained argument. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Bringing a much-needed vocabulary into popular awareness, Hayden's (architecture, American studies, Yale U.) text supplies the names and definitions of the many forms of sprawl existing (and proliferating) in the US. The entry for each term is accompanied by a full-page color aerial photo by Jim Wark (an aerial photojournalist) that clearly identifies the feature described. In addition to the description, each entry tells the origin of the term (including such gems as starter castle, tank farm, and TOAD--a temporary, obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site), and the circumstances leading to its existence.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A visual lexicon of the colorful slang, from alligator investment tozoomburb, that defines sprawl in America.

Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define. This concise book engages its meaning, explains common building patterns, and illustrates the visual culture of sprawl. Seventy-five stunning color aerial photographs, each paired with a definition, convey the impact of excessive development. This "engagingly organized and splendidly photographed" (Wall Street Journal) book provides the verbal and visual vocabulary needed by professionals, public officials, and citizens to critique uncontrolled growth in the American landscape.

Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture and American studies at Yale, writes about the politics of design.