Via Truthout: Why Long Commutes Are Bad for the American Body and Mind
Suburban Sprawl and the Decline of Social Capital
Sunday 22 August 2010
by: Anthony DiMaggio, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Suburban sprawl has long been criticized by urban scholars and intellectuals as damaging to the American mind and environment. On the psychological level, it is seen as damaging to communities, preventing the development of closer relations between residents of suburbs who spend more and more of their time commuting to jobs, and suffer from living within "subdivisions" with little in terms of civic cultural experiences.
Sprawl, simply defined, consists of the outward expansion of metropolitan areas, accompanied by the rise of communities with lower population density. These new communities (suburbs) are heavily car-reliant, and often characterized by large home lots and other expansive uses of land such as golf courses, corporate industrial parks, and large mall complexes.
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