Above are photographs of examples of the urban sprawl or also known as suburban sprawl post World War 2. Urban Sprawl is defined as the spreading of a city and its suburbs over rural land at the fringe of an urban area. The people that reside in these areas tend to live in a single-family home and commute by automobile to work or to run errands elsewhere. This wide spread of moving to housing from within the inner city borders to the countryside started happening in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This was after World War 2 when the GI Bill was implemented and the road building projects were put into place. The so called “suburbia” life was publicized as a better quality of life. Along with the governments help with subsidies and cheap land to buy for housing, urban sprawl went through the population like fire. As it spread though, there was very small amount of control over the planning of these suburban areas. These vastly growing suburban areas are generally a low densely populated development that consists of strip malls and large office buildings, and housing subdivisions, which are all connected by roads. The subdivisions are usually priced within a specific price range. With this wide spread of people, you have a smaller amount of people that own a larger part of land. As the people and housing spreads out so do the buildings and roads. Little did we know, all these factors put together would have a tremendous impact on our environment around us, which we now are seeing signs of in this day. We now see that the urban sprawl has had a detrimental effect on the ecological systems and their functions in nature. Some examples that we can look at are the wildlife habitats and wetlands. The suburban areas what are connected to the commercial developments have now resulted in habitat fragmentation, where it forces the animals that once lived within that area to migrate elsewhere. Also it is changing the migration patterns of certain animals and blocking feeding areas. Not to mention that in urban sprawl areas there is not much in the way of public transportation, so in turn most families own at least one vehicle. This in fluctuates the carbon emissions along with other effects that cars bring into the environment such as air and noise pollutants. With these buildings, huge parking lots and streets, our water supply has been endangered of getting contamination with the new pollutants being synced with the water supply by ways of runoff. For the most part the government is still promoting sprawl, but now very recent there has been efforts to start building “up” in what cities have emerged from this sprawl or urbanization. They are trying to have more restrictive development and zoning policies put into action as well as including tax incentives. Also an effort in making public transportation more affordable and accessible is starting to become more prominent. Urban sprawl is something that is somewhat of a double edged sword, it has its good points but also it is having a huge impact on our environment around us.
http://enviroliteracy.org/article.php/409.html
http://wd.northwestern.edu/assets/Watersheds-7-Urban-Sprawl-article-questions.pdf
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Uncharted 