January 15, 2008 Categories: Reviews
Sprawl: A Compact History
Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago
2005. University of Chicago Press. 306 pp. $27.50 cloth, $17 paper.
Robert Bruegmann went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s to study 18th- and 19th-century architecture. But when he flew in and out of Orly Airport, on the city’s southern edge, he saw something that blew his mind: a cityscape that looked like suburban Chicago or LA. European cities, he thought, were supposed to be pedestrian-friendly, not like our monstrous agglomerations of auto-dependent sprawl. MORE at Chicago Reader website