Witold Rybczynski asks, Is urban sprawl really an American menace?:
In Sprawl, cheekily subtitled ‘A Compact History,’ Bruegmann, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the assumptions that underpin most people’s strongly held convictions about sprawl. His conclusions are unexpected. To begin with, he finds that urban sprawl is not a recent phenomenon: It has been a feature of city life since the earliest times. The urban rich have always sought the pleasures of living in low-density residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities. As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. Pliny’s maritime villa was 17 miles from the city, and many fashionable Roman villa districts such as Tusculum — where Cicero had a summer house — were much closer. Bruegmann also observes that medieval suburbs — those urbanized areas outside cities’ protective walls — had a variety of uses. Manufacturing processes that were too dirty to be located inside the city (such as brick kilns, tanneries, slaughterhouses) were in the suburbs; so were the homes of those who could not afford to reside within the city proper. This pattern continued during the Renaissance. Those compact little cities bounded by bucolic landscapes, portrayed in innumerable idealized paintings, were surrounded by extensive suburbs.
(Hat tip to Virginia Postrel.)