17th century AD

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Jan, 2005 by Martin Fichman, Edmund P. Fowler

ABSTRACT: Urban sprawl's negative impacts have been amply demonstrated, starting as long as 30 years ago, and most North American urban plans have, somewhere, reference to sprawl as bad policy (or, perhaps, absence of policy). Yet North Americans continue to tolerate the construction of more and more suburban subdivisions. This paper suggests an answer to this paradox. We argue that sprawl's attractiveness--if one can call it that--is buried deep in North American cultural predispositions, which we trace to quite specific interpretations of the mechanistic worldview that emerged from 17th and 18th century revolutions in natural philosophy. North American culture is a scientific culture as well as a suburban one. If mechanistic science and its peculiar view of nature is so pervasive and if suburban sprawl is both pervasive and dysfunctional, then this particular form of science and its cultural roots need to be carefully examined. We do this from the perspective of the 21st century, when quantum physics and new discoveries in the ecological and biological sciences are suggesting that many commonly accepted assumptions about physical reality inherited from 17th and 18th century science are flawed.

KEYWORDS: Sprawl; Mechanistic Worldview; Suburbs; Epistemology

INTRODUCTION

Urban sprawl's negative impacts have been amply demonstrated, starting as long as 30 years ago, and most North American urban plans have, somewhere, reference to sprawl as bad policy (or, perhaps, absence of policy). Yet North Americans continue to tolerate the construction of more and more suburban subdivisions. Why? This paper suggests an answer to this question. Specifically, we posit links between scientific worldviews and models of urban and suburban development.

In the last few years, opposition to sprawl has grown somewhat stronger in the United States and Canada. On the one hand, businesses--at least those with some roots in a metropolitan area--are starting to realize how costly sprawl is to any sensible system of commerce (Leo et al. 1998; GTA Task Force 1996; Orlebeke 2002). In addition, research is exploding on other costs-from obesity and social dysfunctions to enormous amounts of air, water, and soil pollution (Bray et al. 2005; Gurin 2003). Some writers have warned that North America's style of suburban development is the most serious single threat to human survival (Register 2002, 106). On the other hand, a new generation of writers and architects has not only produced devastating critiques of suburbanization, but also provided concrete examples of alternative ways of building (Duany, Playter-Zyberk, and Speck 2000; Kunsder 1996; Marshall 2000). These alternative developments have been popular with homebuyers and even some urban planners and politicians.

Nevertheless, the momentum of North America's sprawl has hardly slackened (Lopez and Hynes 2003). An enormous infrastructure is in place: hundreds of billions of dollars in highways, water, and sewer lines; and existing shopping malls, housing, and industrial parks. Furthermore, a financial and institutional infrastructure, including many generous and significant subsidies, which produced such development, is in place and operating smoothly (Winfield 2003; Savitch, 2002). It would be easy to blame corporate developers' political influence and monopolization of the market in new housing for this state of affairs; but these companies are dearly appealing to a responsive clientele.

In this paper we argue that sprawl's attractiveness--if one can call it that--is buried deep in North American cultural predispositions, which we trace to quite specific interpretations of the mechanistic worldview that emerged from 17th and 18th century revolutions in natural philosophy. These cultural forces were part of the collective psyche of the millions of Europeans who emigrated to the New World in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, people who fashioned North America's non-aboriginal culture. By the close of the 19th century this culture had developed an abiding faith in mechanistic science and its promise of material progress. Furthermore, by the 1960s, this culture was also a suburban culture. Suburban sprawl is now a central defining feature of North America's politics, social life, and economics. We focus on this modern North American phenomenon, even though North American-style suburban development has invaded Western Europe as well as many Third World countries.

North American culture, then, is a scientific culture as well as a suburban one. If mechanistic science and its peculiar view of nature is so pervasive and if suburban sprawl is both pervasive and dysfunctional, then this particular form of science and its cultural roots need to be carefully examined. We do this from the perspective of the 21st century, when quantum physics and new discoveries in the ecological and biological sciences are suggesting that many commonly accepted assumptions about physical reality inherited from 17th and 18th century science are flawed. We argue that 21st century science's revision of those assumptions can be correlated with more sensible forms of development than North American sprawl. It must be stressed that we see mechanistic science itself as an outgrowth of early 17th century socio-cultural upheavals. A brief review of this point is appropriate.