Sprawl, the last stage of suburbanization, is the implacable enemy of today's sophisticates. Population pressures, increasing wealth at many levels, and the unslakable thirst of successive generations to "have it all" suggest an enemy that cannot be defeated in open battle, no matter how many small, limited, delaying actions are mounted.

Yet the world changes. The trends, conditions and assumptions that made sprawl almost inevitable are changing in ways that will affect fundamentally both the nature and outcome of the struggle. To understand how this might be we need to reconsider why, no matter how many times they temporarily halted or deflected, the bulldozers continue to advance.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Before the mid-nineteenth century, cities were built around the distance an average person could walk in a day. For some, this meant walking to and from a job before and after what might be a twelve-hour shift. For others, it meant walk to and from school, with sometimes an additional walk home and back for lunch. For still others, it meant walking to a succession of stores for the variety of goods demanded by the home, remembering always not to buy so much at a time that it could not be carried home by the purchaser. A few were lucky enough to have horses or buggies that could extend the effective circle of their daily rounds, or they could have their purchases delivered. But the numbers of this class were insufficient to build a city around, especially when the servants and suppliers of the wealthy had to come and go on foot.

Although the average living space was very small and commercial and factory structures were many-storied, a city created on this basis could never be very large. High-rise apartments could increase usable densities, but without elevators this approach was constrained. When cities, nevertheless, went beyond the walking limit, on closer inspection they could be seen to be little more than collections of smaller cities, "urban villages", that were largely self-sufficient in terms of housing, services, stores, and employment.

The constraints of living in the pedestrian city were strongly felt. The inevitable crowding as cities grew, combined with pre- or early industrial sanitation standards, compounded by the offal of horses and other resident animals, produced conditions that led members of the wealthy urban middle class to purchase summer places, where at least their women and children could spend a few months every year.

The arrival of rail transportation made possible a new city structure that built far beyond the limits of the pedestrian city. Within and around most cities, a web of rails was rapidly spun out; soon, suburbs developed along the steel threads that extended beyond the former built-up area. The development was still constrained by proximity to stations, and, partially as a result, lots remained very small when compared to what was to come. Industry and commerce slowly began to move to the edge of the new cities. As the new transportation system became countrywide, local agricultural produce (especially market gardens and dairies) faced new competition. The resulting decline in the value of the agricultural lands that had formerly hemmed in cities further smoothed the way for urban or suburban expansion.

The pace of suburban development in the rail age should make us cautious when we too easily lay the blame for sprawl on the arrival of automobiles and the internal combustion engine. Yet there is no doubt that the popular acceptance of the automobile led to an exponential explosion of suburban growth. Trains and trolleys had required an ever-expanding network of rails; in their turn, cars, trucks, and buses required the massive extension and improvement of the road system. For either of these processes to occur, large subsidies had to be voted, but subsidies would not have been enough without an insatiable popular desire to take advantage of the new opportunities.

The suburban expansion, particularly the automobile-driven expansion, occurred more rapidly in the United States and Canada than elsewhere in the developed world. Four reasons have been suggested. First, the automobile was developed for a mass market much more rapidly here than in Europe. Partly, this was due to a different attitude toward class divisions. Ordinary Americans were more likely than Europeans to feel they had a "right" to at least a stripped-down version of what the wealthy had. This attitude was fostered by the higher wages that the American economy allowed, feeding back - because of the efforts of Henry Ford and the UAW - from the expansion of the auto industry itself. Second, we had a lot more space. There was little initial cost in turning the prime agricultural land adjacent to many cities into new fields for growing houses or factories. Agriculture was more mobile here: there were always new areas to improve, and with scientific agriculture the area needed for cultivation steadily declined. Third, housing and home mortgage costs were much lower in the United States than Europe, due to different building standards and more government assistance for the homebuyer. Fourth, a higher percentage of Americans than Europeans had only recently moved from farm to city and still retained rural ties. They were more likely to welcome the opportunity to move back into what they imagined to be the more rural suburban life.

In North America, when the "man in the street" became aware that he could purchase housing "in the country" at least as good as he had in the city for mortgage payments little more than he was paying a month for rent, he jumped at the chance. The suburbs swelled.

As the process matured, people in the more elegant suburbs became more and more conscious of the need to protect property values by upgrading what could be built in their communities. Soon, upgrading was occurring almost everywhere. This took the form of increasingly stringent zoning laws. These laws increased the size of building lots from a quarter-acre to a half-acre, then to one-acre, or two or four, or more. They also prohibited "mixed use". Commercial and "industrial" uses were sharply segregated from one another. The "corner store" could no longer be built on the corner. The natural tendencies of suburbia were intensified by law, and this new suburbia might easily quadruple in area while it doubled in population.

As they grew, suburbs gave birth to new spatial patterns of commerce and industry and education that went far beyond new housing patterns, but were based on them and the infrastructure they required. Shops moved to where people had moved. Not only were the new stores spatially more convenient, but in a land that had grown used to purchasing in quantities only an automobile could carry, the new suburban shops had ample land for parking. Modern industry using modern equipment no longer wanted multistory factories. It needed instead expansive single-story structures. The reason corporate headquarters and research institutions moved to rural "parks" is not as clear, but in some cases it had a great deal to do with where the owners and officers of corporations had recently moved.

Commuting patterns now became quite different. For many years, the head of the commuting family went back into the city for his nine-to-five job, his children went to a suburban school and his wife did her shopping at a suburban shopping center. Soon, however, the job, and then with the change in the work force, the jobs of the suburban family were to be found in the urban ring rather than the central city. The new suburbs came to be not so much tethered to the central cities they surrounded as to each other. For most suburbanites, the central city no longer played a significant part in their lives. For cities such as Los Angeles that did their growing exclusively in the age of suburban expansion, the central city never developed. What emerged instead was a broad swathe of low-density urbanization/suburbanization.

Today, urban or suburban sprawl is a shrubby growth of urbanized patches, incorporated and unincorporated, fanning out over the countryside, pushing back the agricultural frontier, surrounding and swallowing formerly independent communities. As sprawl flows across the landscape, it may initially skip the best agricultural lands or most difficult to develop wetlands and rocky hilltops. With time, even these openings will be progressively constricted. Examples are not hard to find.

North of New York City, sprawl long ago reduced southern Westchester County to an almost uninterrupted urban agglomeration; central Westchester soon followed; the process is already in its last stages in northern Westchester. The paving over of Putnam County is in full swing and Dutchess is under pressure. Across the Connecticut border, sprawl has nearly finished its work in Fairfield County, with its progress merging on the east with the similar sprawl of New Haven County, the pattern merging again on its north with that of Hartford County. Indeed, the vast majority of New Englanders now live intimately with the effects of urban sprawl from Portland, Maine to New York City, with its common modes of life and characteristic land-use patterns covering nearly all the territory in between. Of course, this same conurbation continues southeast to below Washington, D.C. with few breaks. Perhaps the best way to understand the result visually is to take a flight from Boston to Washington, and look out the window. The process and its results have operated similarly in most of the country - the same overall pattern, but more and larger rural areas breaking the pattern as we move beyond the most densely populated regions.

According to a recent article in Audubon magazine, the Atlanta Metropolitan Area has doubled in population in the last thirty years, making it one of the fastest growing areas in the country. But the issue is not simply growth. While this means that population has been growing at a rate of 4% a year, the area has grown spatially at four times that rate. "The north-south diameter has grown from 65 to 110 miles in a decade". "Every day 50 acres of trees fall to development". Streams have been destroyed by the runoff of mud, fertilizers, and pesticides, and the explosion in traffic has greatly affected air quality. One after another, the traditional agricultural communities of the region have been infiltrated, subverted, surrounded and irremediably transformed.

Although viscerally, many of us hate what has happened, this "destruction of the countryside", we need to step back and consider why we hate it. And we need to remember that in spite of all the subsidies and special interests that promoted the railroads and roads and easy availability of fuel and the carving up of fields and forests, the essential reason for what has happened is that millions of people making individual decisions have been the engine of sprawl. It has been their decisions at the inner and outer frontiers of sprawl that have kept the motor humming.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH SPRAWL?

Many reasons are advanced for detesting sprawl. The primary environmental arguments are that sprawl has led to an escalating loss of farmland and wildlife habitat (including wetlands). The primary quality of life arguments are that by increasing mobility and destroying consciousness of boundaries, political and psychological, sprawl has contributed greatly to loss of a "sense of place", with both individual and social consequences. This relates to the complex argument that sprawl is both the parent and the child of increasing dependence on the private automobile. Independently, this dependence contributes to environmental damage and resource depletion. The economic argument against sprawl includes this cost, but goes on to specifically point to the greater costs to local governments. They are forced by sprawl to provide services - from water to sanitation to schools, road maintenance, and public health - to an "unnecessarily" widely distributed population. Some point out that maintaining these costly suburban services reduces the monies that should be spent on the far more needy inner cities. The suburbs have also been accused of draining away the jobs the inner cities need, and of promoting racial segregation.

As the suburbs have matured the force of some of these arguments has lessened. Nationally, living standards have steadily risen, as has automobile ownership. No longer are inner city populations locked out of suburban jobs. Commuting in many areas has become increasingly as much "out" as "in", and, as pointed out above, "between" and "among". The steadily decreasing area needed for farming makes moot the question of loss of farmland and compensates somewhat for the loss of habitat. In many regions, farmland and pasture are returning to "nature", albeit initially in a degraded form, at least as fast they are being turned into house farms. As a lifelong amateur naturalist, I am pained by the loss of species, habitat, and wildness. Yet the actual long-run effect of these losses on humanity remains more theory, ideology and taste than proven fact.

As we lose the Eden we had, or thought we had, we must remember that human beings can do quite well in man-made environments. It may perspective to remember that the people of England and Japan, jammed into small, highly developed environments, with little or no undegraded natural habitat, retain a love of nature and an aesthetic understanding of nature that Americans might envy. The Netherlands, an "overdeveloped" country compared to almost any area we can find in the United States, exists as we know it only because of the progressive and methodical destruction of its natural habitat, particularly its wetlands. However, in most measures of quality of life, including some environmental indices, it maintains a high rank. Its people and laws are some of the most civilized in the world.

The opponents of sprawl might argue that our recent development has proceeded very differently than in the intense development of a country like the Netherlands. They might point particularly to the loss of a sense of place; a loss that we imagine did not accompany change to the same degree in the older countries - at least until very recently.

Leaving these comparisons aside, we have a poor understanding of the psychological and social costs of sprawl. In spite of instant interpretations of recent suburban tragedies, no one has proven that people are any more psychologically wounded by suburban life than by any other kind of life. Romantically, I would love to have grown up in the same community as my ancestors, and have arranged things so that I would live and be buried in such a community. But I have not, and I find that I do fairly well with multiple senses of place, and my fellow wanderers seem to cope as well as the local "natives". I am perhaps more conscious of place, of locale, than many who have lived in one place all their lives and never questioned it - and perhaps went through life looking for an opportunity to escape a single defining cultural inheritance.

No one denies there are costs to suburban life in sprawlland, just as every living situation has costs, whether it be the isolated rural homestead or the Manhattan apartment. These would be acceptable costs if the hoped-for advantages that fueled sprawl were garnered. For many, this is no longer so. In saying this, I am not suggesting that the process has come to an end. Clearly, many people must still find what they are looking for at or beyond suburban frontiers, or these frontiers would not be pushed steadily back.

But to my taste, the sprawl is too often the cause of exceedingly long work commutes punctuated by traffic jams and endless strip malls. It has spawned a pattern of life that requires a continual round of service commutes for shopping, ferrying children, or even visiting friends. In most suburban networks, everything is someplace else, and nothing is within walking distance. For many, the suburban urge that led to the one-acre, two-acre, or five-acre lot was fostered by rural ideals, by hopes to "get back to the land". People who grew up on a farm or remembered visiting their grandparents on a farm, or read too much back to the earth literature thought they could recreate this experience, at least in a small way. Many earlier suburbanites did want a pony for the children, to have space for a large garden, or to grow a few fruit trees. But most suburbanites today have little memory of a rural idyll. Beyond a few plantings around the base of the house, and a tree or two in the lawn, how many suburban estates do we see with a garden of any kind? If there is a garden, it is probably the work of a professional gardener. Increasingly, professionals are managing even suburban middle class lawns. The harried commuters in the new two-worker family hardly have time to do more. But I doubt they would till the soil if they could. The acreage required for a development house has more to do with the sense that "the better houses" have "acerage" than with meeting needs for useful space.

CONTROLLING SPRAWL

Regarding suburban sprawl the number one enemy of rational land use, planners propose many solutions to control sprawl and the associated dependence on the automobile. Unfortunately, some popular solutions exacerbate the problem. For example, the expansion of rail systems is generally seen as a way to reduce sprawl and dependence on the automobile. With this in mind, a high-speed train along the Boston to Washington corridor is being brought into service at great expense. While the new service will increase rail usage, it will do little to curtail dependence on the automobile or retard sprawl. It will mean that southeastern Connecticut and southwestern Rhode Island will become more practical suburban addresses for commuters to Boston, Providence, Fairfield County, and New York City. Another popular solution is for wealthy towns to buy up as much as they can of their remaining undeveloped lands and to tighten building regulations, particularly to exclude large commercial or industrial establishments. Such measures arrest sprawl and preserve the aesthetic "look" of a town or county able to afford them. But their secondary effects are less promising. First, they push up the price on the remaining undeveloped parcels in the communities in which these measures are applied. The regional effect of tightening the housing and house site market in established suburbs is to shift the attention of prospective homebuyers and commercial developers to communities beyond the existing suburban frontier. Here they will find communities that feel they need more rather than less development. Such communities will ease the path of developers rather than put obstacles in their path. Thus, the eventual outcome of improved planning is that local sprawl has been contained, but the larger problem, with its associated demand for more highways and further degradation of the regional environment, has been exacerbated.

Planners also hope to retard sprawl through education that will eventually convince potential homeowners that they do not, and should not, want a suburban two-acre spread in a new subdivision. So far this has been a hard sell. The twentieth-century denigration of suburban life in elite literature and the arts has been ineffective. A more effective educational tool could be the development and promotion of alternative housing models through successful village projects. Such projects cluster houses within walking distance of one another and often mix uses so that the pedestrian can once again function for much of the day without a car (particularly if he is retired or a craftsperson). Architects have constructed a variety of such communities, from quaint small villages to semi-urban creations such as Reston and Columbia City outside Washington D.C. The latter typically mix single family houses with condominiums or duplexes. From what I have seen, such models should appeal to a wide public and gradually come to replace the older suburban model. But in practice adoption of these models on a broad scale has been very slow. Local regulations seldom accomodate such changes. It can be argued the regulations would be changed if local builders, developers, and prospective homeowners really took the alternative models seriously. But so far they haven't.

One reason is that some of the arguments for the new models are questionable. For example, one argument is that the village approach saves gasoline by reducing the number of trips the homeowner is required to take in a day. But in fact the small village models do not have the required customer base to support any but the smallest businesses. In turn, only a handful of jobs are created in such communities. As important, Americans have become so habituated to commuting that the few jobs that exist in small communities almost anywhere in North America are likely to be filled by persons from surrounding communities. Only administrators of large cities can take seriously their responsibility to maintain a "job base" within their communities. Likewise, school administrators work against the village model. Increasingly, educators think in terms of separate facilities at scattered locations for different ages, often going beyond the traditional 1-6, 7-9, 10-12, and 13-14 class breakdown to K-2, 1-4 etc. Since more than one single-story school, together with its large playground, is unlikely to fit into a pedestrian village, the effect of a village school on reducing required trips is minimized.

SPRAWL MEETS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

But perhaps the solution to sprawl will come, in part, from unplanned changes in American life that are already well advanced.

In place of the suburban ideals of a previous generation, a new suburban population is playing a more and more aggressive part in sprawlland. They are more likely to have come from another suburb than a central city. Either because of age or inclination, they are more likely than previous generations to neither have children nor plan to have children. Frequently they are embued with positive feelings about nature, about the "ecological crisis", about the need to save open space from the developer - yes, even as they move into a new tract house.

This generation is more likely than their predecessors to be attracted to new models that feature a concentrated village surrounded by a large swath of open space. The fact that they do not live in such a village has a great deal to do with the lack of such villages. Housing in the village-like downtowns that they find in suburbia is too often either greatly overpriced or nestled within unreconstructed pockets of poverty. As mentioned above, one reason for the lack of true village settings in newer communities is that suburban zoning regulations typically mandate the separation of commercial, industrial, and residential uses. Where mixed use exists it is generally "grandfathered" - with the result that residences in village centers are likely to offer early twentieth century rather than twenty-first century amenities. So many new home buyers dream of the village and buy in the tract. They are more reluctant than the previous generation, however, to have still newer people live in a tract next door. Their values more often place a high premium on "nature", they want next door to remain "open space". Consciousness raised, they are less likely than their forebears to allow the wetlands across the road to be filled in.

In the old model, the strip mall and the later supermall followed suburbanites as they pushed back the suburban frontier, just as new roads and schools and then businesses followed behind and strengthened the pattern. This broad advance killed off the stores and shops of the older central cities, and in the suburban expanse then wiped out the small merchants in the village centers that had been engulfed.

Yet as this process matured, it was subverted. By the 1980s more and more people "shopped" in a catalog rather than a store. Few bricks and mortar stores, no matter how large they might be, could cater successfully to the increasingly specialized tastes of their former clienteles. The Internet has taken this trend to a new level. Unlike catalogs, the web offers literally everything, from weekly groceries to clothing, automobiles and antiques. Whether catalog or web site, these virtual outlets offer the choice of not making yet another trip away from home: goods will be chosen from home and delivered to purchasers at their homes. The pattern of "things" being brought to you rather than you going to the things is catching. Nearly all businesses, even the local supermarket, will have to learn to deliver like their great grandfathers did. UPS and the Pizza deliverymen are the harbingers of a new age.

The concept that what you need should be brought to you will increasingly invade other areas of life. Educational services, particularly certain forms of technical education and general education at the community college level, will more and more be offered inexpensively through the net. Educational institutions in this environment can provide highly rated instructors at a lower price than any bricks and mortar institution.

BRINGING THE WORK TO THE WORKERS

More important may be the parallel trend for businesses to bring work to the workers instead of requiring workers to commute to work. The technologies are already here, but the transition has so far been slow. Telemarketing, a primitive form of telework, represented the first attempt to take advantage of the now almost premodern phone system. The computer has allowed society to go far beyond this halting and widely despised beginning. Many at the upper end of the work ladder or nearing retirement are increasingly seizing opportunities to work at a distance. A number of institutions offer trusted employees the opportunity to use a laptop and modem to work "out of the office" a day or two each week. However, the major change will come when the full panoply of information technologies is brought to bear on the workplace. Major corporations and governmental institutions have not yet realized that the technology exists for effective group and one-on-one interaction in almost any modern work situation without the physical presence of all, or even any, of those taking part.

In a recent European Union study, it was estimated that nearly 13% of the U.S. workforce could be classified as "teleworkers". Unfortunately, this is a broad category covering "home-based" workers that work part or full time at home for an employer, self-employed who work out of the home, and "mobile" who work away from the home or main place of work at least ten hours a week. Significantly, only the Netherlands had a higher percentage than the United States and the lowest percentages were for the least developed EU countries (Greece and Spain). A recent study of experience with telework by Washington State businesses found that 34% of businesses had some type of telework program, with employee request being the primary way in which such programs were instituted. Most said that telework improved morale, helped in retaining employees, and increased productivity. Nearly all respondents believed telecommuting would either stabilize or increase (47%). The study suggests that increases that occur in teleworking are likely to be in businesses that already have at least a limited program.

Of the many examples of successful or extensive programs, those of AT&T and Pacific Bell are often mentioned. But there have also been important programs in the public sector, particularly in Washington, D.C. and its environs. The City of Portland began with a pilot program for municipal employees. Experience with this program led to teleworking as a standard work option for many classes of employees. In addition to direct savings, Portland emphasized the reduction in commuting times and in number of commuter miles. Municipal leaders were impressed with the ability of the option to make employment more feasible for mothers with young children and the disabled.

In a review of the reasons for moving toward more dependence on "flexible work locations", the International Workplace Studies Program at Cornell lists more flexibility for employees to choose when and how to work, reduction in time lost in commuting (and other costs of commuting), ability of employees to better balance home and work life, and an expanded labor pool (again, more adaptable to single-parents and the handicapped). They found the downside to flexible locations to include decreased communication and ability to work as a team, lowered productivity in some situations, dissatisfaction with having to give up an office space, and insurance questions attendant on working at home. The latter problem appears largely solved by a recent Department of Labor decision that employers would not be responsible for the health and safety violations relating to persons who worked at home. Many other studies suggest the other problems are likely to be temporary or transitional.

Looked at from another perspective, particularly after the decision of the Department of Labor, employers in many situations are able to project major savings through increased reliance on teleworking. Office facilities will no longer need to be expanded as a business grows, and, indeed, both business expansion and contraction will be much less costly. The dependence on contract workers, consultants, and temps, which is coming to characterize more and more of business and institutional life will also be facilitated by teleworking. As many corporations already are aware, teleworking makes possible the tapping of human resources in other states and countries, making labor both more mobile and less costly.

Intuitively, the foregoing seems to skirt what may be the greatest losses attendant on teleworking for both worker productivity and personal life. Two problems are especially apparent. First, many people do not know how to do a day's work at home. (They may be quite capable of doing home projects, but this is psychologically quite different.) They may or may not be able to develop the ability to effectively bring the office home. It will help some to develop a home office separate from the rest of daily life - perhaps in a basement room or a space over the garage. But many people do not have such spaces, and among those who do, this degree of separation is often inadequate. Second, teleworkers may also suffer from major personal losses associated with separation from "the job" as it now exists. For many, face-to-face interactions with fellow workers are an essential part of their lives. The informal communities that develop in the workplace, whatever its nature, cannot help but be greatly weakened in a telecommuting universe.

One study suggests that these losses will eventually force most teleworkers to develop activities that bring them into more contact with the people of the communities in which they live. They will now have more time in their bedroom communities and they will have more of a social need to participate locally. This increasingly local life-pattern will also be promoted by a new need to use local services (such as cafes and copying services) that otherwise would have been provided at or near the place of work. In fact, the term "bedroom communities" may no longer make sense as life patterns change.

"Telecenters" offer a transitional form that may play a major role in reducing both employee and employer objections to telework. The centers greatly reduce commuting times and are organized to take full advantage of the latest means of communication. Telecenters are either satellite centers operated by a single company or other institution or commercial "executive centers" for use on a short or long-term basis by anyone. Although there is no requirement for personal interaction at such centers, in fact those regularly using such facilities will come to regard them as yet another community in which they have a part. It may offer many teleworkers a business environment where they can work as though at the office, yet somewhat freer of the strains of office politics than the traditional business environment.

One rapidly expanding Seattle firm found that combining teleworking at home with a fully equipped telecenter for employees when they were in town reduced the need for new office space by twenty percent. They also found that this arrangement helped in recruiting and retaining employees (particularly employees of a recently acquired firm in other cities) and increased work effectiveness and productivity. Given the difficult traffic situation in Seattle at top commuting times, executives found that they could effectively work at home until noon, commuting in for the afternoon. The firm plans a new telework center as a part of their expanded telework program.

CONCLUSION

Suburbia has gone through many transformations. Beginning as a housing alternative for a few urban employees clustered around the stations of a limited light rail net, it evolved with the automobile into the major housing alternative for urban employees in metropolitan areas. As the pattern developed, suburban shopping centers replaced downtown areas for frequent shopping excursions, and then, gradually, for nearly all forms of purchases. When corporate headquarters and other major business facilities relocated to the suburbs, commuting became commuting among suburban communities, rather than in and out of a central city. This shift in the location of business and population led to the shift of the full range of service businesses to the suburbs. Service workers, construction employees, and teachers became a major part of the suburban - and commuting - mix. As these trends matured, the area engulfed by the suburbs marched steadily across county and then state lines. The suburbanite no longer was constrained by the distance of a potential home from the central city.

New trends will alter the picture once again. Catalogue sales have reduced the appeal of both urban and suburban shopping areas. The web has accelerated this trend, taking business at a distance into new areas, such as shopping for airline tickets, used cars, or antiques. New forms of work and new ideas about work have spawned increased use of teleworking as a viable option in many businesses. Instead of bringing the worker to the work, the work is now being brought to the worker. The limits of these trends are hard to foresee. People are becoming steadily more accustomed to using delivery trucks to satisfy their needs; in some areas they are beginning to buy even daily groceries over the internet. These trends suggest a partial reversion to an earlier day when delivery trucks lined the street to bring the householder vegetables, meats, newspapers, milk, and other necessities.

Where this leaves the future of urban sprawl is debatable. At first sight, the idea that we can do anything we wish wherever we live would seem to open the entire country to unimpeded sprawl. But if we remember the study that suggested that teleworkers would be forced to become more dependent on their home community rather than their work community for their social life, we could visualize a new and unplanned control over the depredations of sprawl. In the obsolescent suburban model, long-distance, regular commuters have little time or attention left for their home community, for anything at home but quick meals and sleep. The teleworkers of the new suburbia will have time to develop local connections outside the home, to utilize and contribute to the resources of their own towns. It will now make a critical difference in the quality of their lives if they have close neighbors, if they can walk down the street to a convenience store, a local library, the town hall, or a village park.

This change will be similar to that we observe in the "new old", the healthy retired who have been left to float in the suburbs. No longer required to commute to work someplace else, this generation is finding "work", albeit largely voluntary, in their local communities. Whether they moved to their new residences at retirement, or remained there after retirement, whether they live in a traditional suburban home or have moved into a senior residential facility (often a grouping of attached condos), they are more likely to contribute to the local community than formerly. They are also a part of change in suburbia since this age group forms a major part of the suburban population today, and will become an increasing part as the general population ages. Their greater willingness to settle in housing complexes that consume much less of the countryside will, in itself, reduce pressures to advance the suburban frontier.

The shift to bringing work to workers and products and services to consumers may play a major role in recreating the spatial communities that were lost along the freeways and subdivisions of nowheresville. But if this is to happen, then the communities created or infiltrated by sprawl must recognize the possibility and plan for it. They must encourage the strengthening of village centers with both affordable and high-end housing, and rewrite zoning regulations to make possible both clustered development and mixed use in new developments. If there is to be a demand for a new kind of suburbia, a less sprawling, more village-centered suburbia, those who are already on the ground must prepare the way. Technology alone will not redesign utopia.

Neither these trends nor the preparations that might assist them will in themselves bring sprawl to an end. But they could significantly ameliorate its effects, reduce the clogging of freeways and the consequent demand for new freeways, make possible the preservation of larger swaths of open space within the sprawl, and retard the advance of the suburban frontier. Together these forces will provide a more civilized and natural life for all. This will not bring back the pre-urban past of our dreams. But it will be a result worth working for.

BACKGROUND AND SELECTED SOURCES

On Sprawl

As a resident of a small New England community, I have served several years on the Planning Commission, the Open Space Subcommittee, and the board of a land conservation trust. This and related experience and the many documents that have crossed my desk in the course of civic work are a major source of the article.

Some documents reviewed specifically for this article were:

Randall Arendt, Designing Open Space Subdivisions, September 1994.

Congress for New Urbanism, "Charter", and "New Urbanism Basics", 1996.

Demographia, "The Crusade Against Urban Sprawl: Assaulting the American Dream", February 1999.

"Divided We Sprawl", The Atlantic Monthly, December 1999, pages 26-42.

Robin Dripps, et al, "Re-imagining Duke Massie", proposal, 1995

Economist, "Urban Sprawl Not Quite the Monster They Call It", August 21, 1999.

Timothy Egan, "The New Politics of Urban Sprawl", The New York Times, November 15, 1998, Section 4, pages 1ff.

Eben Fodor, "The Three Myths of Growth", Planning Commissioner's Journal, 1996.

Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, Basic Books, 2000.

Weston Kosovo, "The Race to Save Space", Audubon, March-April 2000, pages 68-69.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man Made Landscapes, Simon and Schuster, 1993

Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life, Viking Penguin, 1997

Fen Montaigne, "There Goes the Neighborhood", Audubon, March-April 2000, pages 60-70 (on Atlanta).

Planner's Web (Planning Commissioner's Journal on the web; many articles) Especially: "Problems Associated with Sprawl" No date, perhaps 1998.

Rick Pruetz, Saved by Development: Preserving Environmental Areas, Farmland and Historic Landmarks With Transfer of Development Rights, Arje Press, 1999.

"Sprawl", Hemispheres Magazine, September 1999, pages 81-91.

D. J. Waldie, "Do the Voters Really Hate Sprawl?" The New York Times, Op-Ed, March 3, 2000.

On Telework

Pamela Blais, "How the Information Revolution is Shaping Our Communities", Planner's Commissioner's Journal, fall 1996.

Center of Excellence for Sustainable development, "Success Stories", February 2000.

Cornell University International Workplace Studies program. Various items, including:

Excerpts from Digital Equipment Corporation questionnaire on the "Mobile Workplace", n.d.;

"New Working Practices", 1995; and

"Telework Centers and Satellite Offices". n.d.

ETO, "Teleworking: How many teleworkers", 1999 (EC telework study).

Steven Greenhouse, "Home Office Isn't Liability for Firms, U.S. Decides", The New York Times, page A-13, January 28, 2000.

JALA International, "Telework Center Cost-Benefit Sample", January 1998.

George Mason University, "Telecenter Prices", 1999.

Mariscal Weeks McIntyre Friedlander, "Telecommuting Case Study", 1997.

Robert Moskowitz, "Freestanding Telework Centers", January 2000. (At: www.smartbz.com).

John McHutcheon, Canoe Money, "Telecommuting biggest workplace trend: survey", January 2000.

Jack Nilles, "Thoughts on the Future of Telecommuting", Fleming LTD, January 1998.

Oregon Office of Energy, "City of Portland Gives Telecommuting a Thumbs Up following a Six-Month Test", September 1999.

"Pacific Bell to Provide Sun with Telecommuting Services", SunFlash, October 1995.

Washington State University, Energy Program, "Washington Telework Study", February 1999.

" " " , "Telework: Compressed Workweeks Flextime", "Case Study: ConneXt", 1998.

Ridewise (www.ridewise.org/programs/workwise.htm) offers a number of case studies of telecommuting. No date, perhaps 2000.