You know that leapfrog pod of snoutnoses out in the rhubarb by the edge node? Well, neither does anyone else. But these handy and amusing terms are among the three dozen or so compiled a few years ago by Yale University architecture professor Dolores Hayden in her eternally useful Field Guide To Sprawl. It’s a fun resource (”Look, Ma, a LULU!”) for identifying all the various types of sprawl-specific structures that now dominate the built landscape.
We spoke with Hayden the other day and inquired on the state of sprawl in America, now that Obama has officially declared it’s “over.” Hayden is dubious about that pronouncement. “I don’t think most people understand how many taxpayer dollars have gone into this style of development,” she says. “Even Obama probably doesn’t. Turning this around is complicated. We have so many programs that would have to have to be changed. Think about the fact that all 50 states are behaving differently in terms of priorities. We still don’t have a national land use policy.”
Even if we get that sorted out, sprawl’s legacy will be with us for a long time. Employing the lingo of her book, Hayden says, “It will take a while to get rid of all the ’starter castles’ and ‘privatopias.”‘
Click through for eight of our favorite terms from A Field Guide to Sprawl with illustrative aerial photos by Jim Wark.
ALLIGATOR: Real estate that eats money – for instance, a plot that a developer has subdivided and is paying taxes on, but hasn’t yet developed.
GROUND COVER: Inexpensive, easily bulldozed buildings such as self-storage units, constructed to generate income while a developer holds land.
LULU: A “locally unwanted land use” creates a problem for people because of the way it looks, smells, sounds or pollutes. It may be a parking lot, a waste incinerator, a prison, or a nuclear facility.
STREETCAR BUILDOUT: “Between 1870 and 1910, horsecars and then electric streetcars carried people to lots subdivided by speculators who owned the transit lines. With the creation of vast neighborhoods of houses for working people, many cities double and tripled in size. Many streetcar buildouts were unplanned growth, but these neighborhoods were denser than ’sitcom suburbs’ of the 1950s, because they were not designed for private automobiles.” (Photo is of Roebling, NJ)
TANK FARM: A storage facility for oil or liquid natural gas.
T.O.A.D.: “Coined by planners and lawyers, TOAD is an acronym for a temporary, obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site. TOADs may be abandoned shopping malls or closed industrial sites, such as this abandoned blast furnace in Youngstown, Ohio.”
TRUCK CITY: “Facilities to serve the nation’s 92 million trucks are a familiar part of the landscape.”
ZOOMBURG: A suburb growing even faster than a “boomburg.”
March 19th, 2009 at 11:53 am
All these hideous eyesores are actually quite a sight from bird’s-eye view. zoomburg looks like the indie 500!
March 19th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Of course they look good, they were designed from the infinite space of a drafting board and look great to the planner from up there. It’s funny then, when those overdeveloped street grids and uniform house sizes end up not really adding anything to the architectural character of a locale, and are just confusing or incoherent. Grids all the way.
March 9th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
The picture of Youngstown is almost 10 years old. That image today would reveal a new highway, industrial park and an expanding steel mill.