Rethinking Urban Sprawl and Community

Posted by Bill Pieper

February 25, 2007

In my December 2006 posting I speculated about the likely deleterious effects of the growing influx of newcomers on established community patterns in the Sierra. Based on the comments I received, I've thought more on the subject and done a little research.

There is no doubt that community patterns and structures in the Sierra are changing and will continue to do so, but perhaps the label deleterious was too reflexive. Certain changes, after all, can be for the better, or can be better for some of those effected and worse for others. The very idea of better or worse can even be in the eye of the beholder.

Over the course of my life I have lived in a small town, a very small town, a rural setting, suburbs and big cities. Each had patterns of community, now that I reflect on it, but those patterns were certainly most tight-knit in the very small town. But whatever the setting, duration of residence and participation in voluntary organizations counts for quite a bit. You need to be around for a while, and to be associated with identifiable activities in order to get on the social radar. It could be that that just happens faster in a very small town, where everybody in the pond is a proportionally bigger frog.

The research I alluded to was reading a very provocative paper titled Social Interaction and Urban Sprawl by Jan K. Brueckner and Ann G. Largey. The former is at UC-Irvine and serves as editor of The Journal of Urban Economics. The latter is at Dublin City University in Ireland. My copy of their paper came from the Social Science Research Network website http://www.SSRN.com/abstract-946914. In it they make a convincing case for something quite counterintuitive.

The most common critique of suburban and ex-urban sprawl is that families and individuals are thrown more and more in on themselves as population density decreases, thus having less social interaction with those outside their household. In other words, urban neighborhoods would seem to promote social interaction. Multi-family housing, the availability of convenient public transportation and a rich choice of cultural activities to share should mean lots of contact with others. And it does, but it often substitutes contact that is largely anonymous for what the researchers identify as "meaningful" contact. That contact, in the form of visiting each other's homes and participating in local volunteer organizations, actually increases in an almost linear way as population density decreases.

Yes, even in the suburbs and exurbs, often portrayed as dead zones, as well as in rural areas. Who'd'a thunk it? Population dispersal creating net gains in community, at least among those undergoing dispersal. Of course, people already in the receiving locations, who may find their population density increasing, could experience the reverse, a loss of the kind of community they've previously known. But since no two people are interchangeable, and none of us live forever, community patterns are changing all the time anyway. And while some individuals are negatively effected by those changes, I have to admit that I find the process itself fascinating.

In fact, what may at first seem like losses may be incidental breakage associated potential net gains. Or not. For now, though, I plan to be more cautious about inferring that all community change in the Sierra is bad.

Bill Pieper, Author of Belonging – A Novel of Downieville and California's Modern Gold Country (Comstock Bonanza Press, 2006) and other fiction titles http://stores.ebay.com/bpbooks