Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Click to enlarge

Print Price: $37.50

Format:
Hardback
240 pp.
6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780199360147

Publication date:
April 2014

Imprint: OUP US

Dead End

Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism

Benjamin Ross

More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, "Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over." Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason.

As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-ridden suburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacy organization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight of land use.

Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanists, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live.

Readership : Suitable for students and scholars of urban planning, urban politics, sociology, and American history.

Introduction - Escape from the suburbs
Part I - Getting Hooked
1. The strange birth of suburbia
2. Planners and embalmers
3. Government-sponsored sprawl
4. Ticky-tacky boxes
5. Jane Jacobs vs. the planners
6. Saving the city
7. The age of the nimby
Part II - The Sprawl Addiction
8. Spreading like cancer
9. The war of greed against snobbery
10. A new thirst for city life
11. Backlash from the right
12. The language of land use
Part III - How to Kick the Habit
13. Struggles for smart growth
14. Democratic urbanism
15. Affordable housing in an ownership economy
16. On track toward livable cities
Afterword

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Benjamin Ross was president of Maryland's Action Committee for Transit for 15 years, which grew under his leadership into the nation's largest grass-roots transit advocacy group. He is a consultant on environmental problems and served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences and EPA Science Advisory Board. He writes frequently on political and social topics in Dissent Magazine and is the author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment.

Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
Crabgrass Frontier - Kenneth T. Jackson
Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship - Thad Williamson
Twentieth-Century Sprawl - Owen D. Gutfreund
Bird on Fire - Andrew Ross

Special Features

Brings together the history of suburbanization and urban decline & revival in a single book for the first time, providing an unparalleled synthesis of leading cross-disciplinary scholarship in urban history and urban planning.
Lays out the first comprehensive political strategy for the New Urbanist movement.
Analyzes sprawl as the outcome of social and political forces, not just bad planning.
A new explanation of "not-in-my-backyard" politics, as motivated by status-seeking and protection of neighborhood "brand images".
Offers a wide-ranging historical overview, an analysis of contemporary planning, and suggestions for how to effect change in the modern age.
Lays out the first comprehensive political strategy for the New Urbanist movement.