Sprawl: From B (Boomburb) to Z (Zoomburb)
Recording, in words and photos, the relentless growth that’s consuming America, acre after acre after acre. 
By Kim Connors

A Field Guide to Sprawl
By Dolores Hayden
Aerial photographs by Jim Wark
W.W. Norton, 128 pages, $19.95

In today’s globalized world, people have been able to take their supersized ecologicial footprint to the world’s far reaches. But just as technology has enabled this expansion, it has also given us the tools to view it, and, through such methods as satellite imagery and aerial mapping and photography, to record it in minute detail.

A Field Guide to Sprawl, by Dolores Hayden, documents this inexorable development, both in words and through the dramatic aerial photography of Jim Wark. Hayden even offers up a new vocabulary to describe these trends, adding to a language that includes the familiar terms already applied to the places we live and work: the city’s “concrete jungle,” suburbia’s “white picket fence,” and the “bucolic countryside.” Some of these terms—Pork Chop Lot, Snout House, and TOAD, for instance —seem to have been conjured up by the late Dr. Seuss.

Hayden introduces readers to the population’s massive migratory movements from a historical, political, and financial, as well as an environmental, point of view. He shows readers the forces that have driven such exponential growth and the characters who have played major roles in it, from ambitious politicians in the pockets of industrial companies to the ardent conservationists opposing them.

In some ways the rest of the guide resembles a children’s book, each pair of pages sporting both an eye-catching photo (or photos) and a bright-red glossary term. Some of the terms are tongue and cheek: a Pork Chop Lot is an interior lot reached by a long driveway, and a Snout House is a home whose protruding garages take up most of their lawns and street frontage. But the smiles end there. Take TOAD for example. A stocky innocuous amphibian might come to mind. However, this apt acronym, coined by lawyers and developers, actually stands for a Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned, or Derelict site. The matching photo shows a squat, ugly, rusty structure, a typical result of short-sighted development wasting away. 

Wark’s photos provide a unique bird’s-eye view that is visually compelling and mentally disturbing at the same time. Take a quick glance and you might see a pleasing geometric pattern of perfectly spiraled squares. But upon closer inspection you notice that the identical rectangles are actually individual condos clustered tightly together, barely separated by thin circumferences of asphalt. Welcome to Sun City, Arizona, a Zoomburb, which could be aptly described as a Boomburb on steroids. A common thread among the photos is the barren borders around the sites. The only trees to be found are around “Starter Castles,” where the wealthy can afford acres of natural privacy; that is, after razing as many trees as they need for the long, winding driveway, the tennis court, and the in-ground pool.

The images in Hayden’s guide are all too familiar, even if some of the words to describe them are not. But whether we call them Pods, Ducks, or Edge Nodes, all of these land-use practices do not bode well for the American landscape.