Sprawl in the UK is not quite the same as sprawl in the US.

For one thing, America has plenty of space; they’ve used just 3% of it thus far.  This imparts an ability to survive not just the extra consumption of land, but the pollution and energy drain as well.  In Britain, on the other hand, we’re dependent upon importation of food, since we already have a population twice the size we can feed, and energy, since we have already exhausted our natural resources.  (The one exception is coal, but that would require carbon capture and secure storage — something as yet unproven, and likely to be expensive.)

But there’s another problem : villages and towns are tightly packed on our little island.  Sprawl tends to run roughshod over these, destroying all that was attractive in them.  I witnessed the overrun of my own home village, the arrival of crime and antisocial behaviour, and its complete loss of identity.  Schools, shops, and pubs, closed, while the price of a home rose beyond what I and my brothers could afford, giving the lie to the promise that more houses would mean cheaper houses.  People stopped caring about the place.

And now it’s happening again where I live now.

First, the nearby main road was converted to a four-lane highway, bringing noise and air pollution.  (Light pollution is soon to follow.)  Next, the lanes through the village become rat-runs, with constant traffic, much of it driven too fast and with little care.  Now, we are faced with large housing developments, both between us and the neighbouring town, and within the village itself.  None of it comes near the scale and luxury typical in American sprawl.

Pretty soon, we’ll have the same concrete soulless continuum that dissolved my former home.

I’ve just finished reading James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere.

There is clearly a much bigger problem on the other side of the pond than in dear old Blighty.

I remember staying in the wonderfully named Hampton Inn (you have to know some English slang) near Tampa.  We tried walking to the nearest restaurant – about 50 yards down the street on the opposite side.  This was rewarded by honking horns and shouts of abuse.  I guess the lack of a pavement (sidewalk) should have given us a clue.

Kunstler’s book was refreshing, in that it reassured me that there are some at least in the US who can see the problem and who want something better.  I found it quite eloquent also : “… the motive force behind suburbia has been the exaltation of privacy and the elimination of the public realm.”

So it was sad to see the same rather snobby, and poorly informed, view of Walt Disney and his creations I’ve come across in other US ‘cognoscenti’.  While it may be true that Americans are “as addicted to illusion … as to cheap petroleum”, I think some forget that DisneyLand and Disney World are designed (mostly) for kids.  Kunstler concedes that, on approaching Disney World, “gone are the hotels, bill-boards, gas stations and other junk”, and that on arriving one finds “a public realm free of autos”.  Sounds good to me.  And he’s just plain wrong when condemning EPCOT (the city Walt would have built had he survived) as Corbusian.  It just isn’t.  There are no towers in which residents are incarcerated, nor is it predicated on the car.  It consists of neighbourhoods, interconnected by a light rail (transit) network, facing common public space.  Car access is there but to the back of each house, as in New Urban design.

Aside from a little too much cynicism, this is a worthy summary of just how much has changed, and why life for ordinary people has got very much harder over the last fifty years.

When he says that “Americans have been living car-centred lives for so long that the collective memory of what used to make <habitat> humanly rewarding has nearly been erased,” I find myself wondering how many Brits there are left who can remember something better than sprawl.  You cannot value what you never have known.