Sprawl Chronicle Part Next
Silly word if you say it over and over - Sprawl. It’s come to mean unpleasant urban- undesign. It’s the SUV-crowded pavement, franchise architecture, big boxes, big parking lots, billboards and miles after miles of discontinuous cul-de-sacs lined with frame stucco boxes. Sprawl impacts can be close to home. Scary-fast building in the last thirty years has radically altered the places we grew up, especially the edge of town.
The common practice of mass-grading multiple acres before construction removes all traces of what was there before. Rape and Scrape some call it. Mass-grading is practiced by every large development of “raw” land and is to some extent required by ordinances to re-contour land for storm water runoff. Doing this obliterates natural watersheds, vegetation and animal life, any remnants of historic or prehistoric occupation and sometimes even the soil itself.
That’s sprawl. And that’s only one thing it does. But obliterating place is a pretty big thing. Coco
Why don't I find any comments here? Have none of your readers visited Dallas/Fort Worth? Nor the horror of horrors, Houston?
Posted by: Catmoves | Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 12:50 PM