Robert Bruegmann is a professor of architecture, art history and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is chair of the art history department. He is also a well-regarded author on the issue of suburban growth and is the author of the recent book Sprawl: A Compact History (UChicago Press 2005). In this LA Times op-ed (free reg required), Professor Bruegmann challenges the conventional wisdom that Los Angeles is the epitome of urban sprawl run amok and that the northeastern metro areas are paragons of sound urban planning:

Los Angeles is not a particularly good example of urban sprawl. Take the part about being unplanned. The truth is that New York, Chicago and most of the older American cities had their greatest growth before there was anything resembling real public planning; the most basic American land planning tool, zoning, did not come into widespread use until the 1920s.
L.A., by contrast, was one of the country’s zoning pioneers. It has had most of its growth since the 1920s, during a period when planning was already important, and particularly since World War II, when California cities have been subject to more planning than cities virtually anywhere else in the country.

Professor Bruegmann proceeds to point out that the density of the Los Angeles region has increased dramatically in the post World War II era as the density of the northeastern U.S. metro areas has plummeted, and that such increase in density has occurred during a time when Los Angelinos were becoming more automobile dependent rather than less. In fact, Professor Brudgmann notes that the growing congestion in the Los Angeles region is not so much a result of urban sprawl, but of increasing density of population coupled with too few miles of freeway per capita in L.A. compared with most other U.S. urban areas. He concludes by observing why these facts often do not make a dent in the conventional wisdom:

Of course, none of these objections to standard wisdom are likely to sway many highbrow critics of sprawl. Their desire to see L.A. as sprawl and therefore as not truly urban is based less on rational analysis than on subjective aesthetic judgments and class resentment.
But there are major problems with their position. First, there is considerable room for doubt that sprawl is necessarily the major problem that many anti-sprawl crusaders believe it to be. But, in any case, Los Angeles is not a good model of sprawl. The urban area of New York or Boston, for example, each surrounded by a huge low-density penumbra, would make a better poster child for sprawl than the dispersed but relatively dense and compact Los Angeles.

Read the entire piece. Hat tip to Peter Gordon for the link to Professor Bruegmann’s op-ed.