Twentieth-Century Sprawl

Here, Owen Gutfreund offers a fascinating look at how highways have dramatically transformed American communities nationwide, aiding growth and development in unsettled areas and undermining existing urban centers.
Gutfreund uses a follow the money approach, showing how government policies subsidized suburban development and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity. The consequence was a combination of unstoppable suburban sprawl, along with ballooning municipal debt burdens, deteriorating center cities, and profound changes in American society and culture.
Gutfreund tells the story via case studies of three communities--Denver, Colorado; Middlebury, Vermont; and Smyrna, Tennessee. Different as these places are, they all show the ways that government-sponsored highway development radically transformed America's cities and towns.
Based on original research and vividly written, Twentieth-Century Sprawl brings to light the benefits and consequences of the spread of American highways and makes a major contribution to our understanding of issues that still plague our cities and suburbs today.


Twentieth-Century Sprawl demonstrates convincingly how the financing of highways became a de facto national policy that subsidized growth on the urban periphery at the expense of older cities and inner-ring suburbs. We are living with the consequences of this policy today. A compellingly important book.--David Schuyler, Professor of American Studies, Franklin and Marshall College, and author of A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1940-1980

A good primer on the road we took to the suburbanization of America--so that we don't drive it exactly the same way in the future.--Detroit Free Press

In the first thorough history of urban sprawl, Owen Gutfreund reveals how misguided government programs, business lobbying, and civic boosterism led to America's radically decentralized urban landscape and shows the high social and financial costs of subsidizing automobility. Twentieth-Century Sprawl will appeal to historians, planners, and policy-makers--and anyone who wants to understand how we wound up in the traffic-clogged mess we're in.--Clifton Hood, Professor of History, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and author of 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York

In examining three disparate sites--in Colorado, Tennessee, and Vermont--Owen Gutfreund convincingly argues that the impact of the automobile goes beyond individual preferences and local needs. Rather, he shows that automobility has been driven by government policies at all levels with profoundly disturbing consequences. Bound to fuel further criticism and debate, Gutfreund's study deserves close consideration in any future policy debate over the course of metropolitan development.--Howard Gillette, Jr., Professor of History, Rutgers University-Camden, and author of Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C.

In Twentieth-Century Sprawl, Owen Gutfreund challenges prevailing myths equating highway construction with equity and choice to show how competition over finances, route ways, and political authority gave rise to cross-sectoral coalitions among advocates from rural roads, inter-metropolitan parkways, and a national system of primary motorways. Through a carefully selected set of case studies the author links policy with practice and we come to see our contemporary urban landscape anew, as the product of specialized knowledge, narrow definitions of the public good, and a surprising degree of ad hoc planning.--Greg Hise, School of Policy, Planning & Development, USC