Becoming Sensitive to Sprawl
The first step to solving any problem is to recognize it. This can be especially difficult when a problem doesn’t really seem like a problem at all, at least to those most equipped to address it. This is the case with urban sprawl.
In his piece “Sensitizing,” Bruno Latour introduces us to the idea of (surprise, surprise) sensitizing. Latour describes sensitizing as the act of becoming sensitive or aware of a scenario or issue and realizing how it relates to our own lives. Latour said “becoming sensitive requires taking account of the everyday experience of being,” a sentiment that I felt resonated strongly with my topic of interest: urban sprawl.
As I set out to learn more about sprawl through fieldwork, I sought out someone I know has first-hand experience with Austin’s sprawl: my best friend’s mother, Lezlie. Although Lezlie insisted she was no expert on the subject, she has lived in Austin since 1991, both downtown and in the country that became the suburbs, and that made her an expert for my purposes. I wanted to speak to people whose lives were shaped by urban sprawl but not in blatantly obvious ways. Lezlie has seen Austin’s sprawl over the last 30 years, but she didn’t personally have a hand in how it was developed or planned out. This made her an ideal candidate to weigh in on my investigation into how sensitized the average sprawl dweller is to urban sprawl.
I didn’t have to look much further to settle on my second interview subject: Lezlie’s daughter, my best friend Elizabeth. Elizabeth was born and raised in the Austin suburbs but recently moved to downtown Manhattan for college. I thought she would be able to offer an interesting perspective as someone who has experienced both sprawling suburban and compact urban living environments. I was curious if her experience leaving the suburban bubble made her more sensitive to the issue of sprawl.
My set of questions for my two interviewees varied slightly, with Lezlie’s interview focusing on how Austin has changed over the years and how she feels urban sprawl affects her day-to-day life and Elizabeth’s interview focusing on the differences between life in Austin and New York. In both interviews, I asked about their familiarity with the term “urban sprawl” and its long-term environmental consequences.
In this investigation, I also set about interviewing places. My first stop was Senna Hills, a single-use residential neighborhood in the Bee Cave area, about 15 miles from downtown Austin. I used to live in a neighborhood nearby and have had several friends who lived there, so I was familiar with the general layout and structure of the neighborhood and decided it was a good example of the sprawl-like development I was discussing in my research. After speaking with Lezlie about her experience living in suburbia, I wanted to be able to bring my own observations about life in the sprawl and why it can be difficult for people to become sensitized to the issues surrounding it.
The second place I decided to investigate in my fieldwork was Emma Long Metropolitan Park, or more specifically, the journey to it from my West Campus apartment. Emma Long Park is a gorgeous lake park with a dock, plenty of green grass, picnic tables, and beautiful scenery. It’s about a 30-minute drive to the park from my apartment, and the journey includes an interesting progression of landscapes that I believed could provide some insight into what Austin’s sprawl really looks like and how we experience it on a daily basis. With this in mind, I set out on the drive to Emma Long Park with the intention to take it all in and see what I could observe.
Since urban sprawl is an issue that is tied so closely to the lives of those that live within it and continual outward development happens over the course of several years, it may be a while until people begin to notice changes to their environment due to sprawl. Latour argues that issues are not “still lifes’’ that can be stopped and easily observed. To me, this sentiment relates to the idea that when you are living within the context of an issue, it is difficult to see it for everything that it is or even know that the issue exists. In my interview with Lezlie, she said she really started noticing Austin’s changing landscape in the early 2000s when the traffic became noticeably much worse. Latour would describe this as the issue shifting from a “matter-of-fact” to a “matter-of-concern,” as Lezlie began to notice the consequences of sprawl as the trajectory of the issue collided with her day-to-day life.
In the conversation about how sprawl impacts her day-to-day life, Lezlie commented on how grocery shopping has become more accessible due to sprawl. This surprised me because I always considered sprawl a factor that decreased accessibility to food and shopping due to its emphasis on single-use zoning, but Lezlie said two HEBs were eventually built within 15 minutes of her house, marking a huge improvement from the original 30-minute commute she had to make to Oak Hill just to stock up her fridge.
In this conversation with Lezlie, I began to realize that perhaps what prevents people from becoming sensitive to the issue of urban sprawl isn’t necessarily an inability to recognize the matters-of-fact and how they translate into matters-of-concern, but rather an internal conflict between enjoying the individual benefits of suburban living and realizing the long-term negative environmental consequences.
My time in the Senna Hills neighborhood presented a spatial representation of this idea. As I walked along the wide, evenly paved sidewalks past rows of two-story houses with lush gardens and big shady trees growing in their spacious green yards, the appeal of living in a residential development was very clear. Elizabeth mentioned that, while in New York, she often misses having a backyard and easily accessible natural space where she can get some fresh air.
She also said that experiencing nature in the city was an “event,” which is an idea I found personified during my drive to Emma Long Park. In order to reach this beautiful, natural space, I sat in traffic on Mo-Pac, looking at man-made concrete infrastructure, surrounded by other idling cars. We’ve normalized making it an event to experience natural spaces. We accept that there will be ugly on our journey to a more appealing destination. We have become satisfied with small pockets of nature that we can briefly escape to if we have the time and means to do so. We may feel less inclined to become sensitive to the issue of sprawl because we haven’t completely lost the green spaces…yet.
Although Elizabeth spoke of a lack of fresh air in the city, that — along with good barbecue, according to Elizabeth — appears to be one of the few things inaccessible to those living in New York City. On her block, there are three gyms, a Greek restaurant, a thrift store, a grocery store, an NYU residence hall, a Walgreens, and a post office. Residents of Senna Hills, on the other hand, must drive at least a mile on a five-lane highway to get to a school, store, or any food establishment. Without a car, these resources are difficult to access.
Elizabeth’s walkable access to most things she could need on a daily basis represents the benefits of multi-use zoning, a key element in city planning design that would reduce urban sprawl. Continued development did help make groceries more accessible to Lezlie, but what if we stopped developing homes on lots that are that far away from grocery stores in the first place? Lezlie’s commute to the grocery store is still a minimum of 10 minutes on a heavily trafficked road. To many, this matter-of-concern would not outweigh the benefits of suburban living. Even Elizabeth, whose residence in a one-window basement apartment in downtown Manhattan gives her a very removed viewpoint at which to examine the issue of urban sprawl, acknowledges the appeal of a big yard, a private commuting space, and a house full of windows.
I would like to acknowledge that this view of urban sprawl is skewed by the privilege of the people and places I interviewed. Of course, not all sprawling developments are as luxurious as the affluent neighborhood of Senna Hills, and gentrification is an issue tied closely to sprawl that I have not discussed in this essay. As I went about investigating what it takes to become sensitive to this issue, I chose to focus on these particular people and places because they represent middle and upper-middle-class communities that might not face the immediate environmental consequences of this issue but who generally have more political pull in addressing these issues due to socioeconomic status. When asked if she believes there is a solution to urban sprawl, Elizabeth said there are definitely strategies that could be used to reduce its continuation and impacts, but most Americans are not in a place where they will accept that changes need to be made.
This fieldwork has allowed me to dive deeper into the complexities of the conversation about urban sprawl. Research papers and articles are often confined to cover one main idea. People and places, on the other hand, don’t have to adhere to a thesis statement. They can contradict themselves and offer new perspectives that might not be entirely fleshed out but represent the realities of the issue regardless. This forced me to reevaluate my own thoughts on the issue, which I believe helped me become more rhetorical because I had to grapple with conflicting information and determine how to present it in one argument.
Sensitizing ourselves to an issue like urban sprawl, which is so deeply ingrained in our ideas about how society should function, goes beyond educating ourselves on the issue and becoming aware of its presence and impact. It will take a collective shift in priorities. At the end of our interview, Lezlie said that there will always be loss along with the gain. Simply put, we can’t have everything. And while Lezlie was using this idea to refer to a city’s inherent need for growth, I think it can also be used to explain why we should adjust this growth to be more environmental. If we are ever going to fully combat sprawl, we have to accept what we may lose — privacy, space, land — and recognize what we will gain: a more sustainable environment.
Works Cited:
Latour, Bruno. “Sensitizing.” Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense, edited by Caroline Jones, David Mather, and Rebecca Uchill, MIT Press, 2016, pp 315–323.
