Robert Bruegmann is distinguished professor emeritus of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Sprawl: A Compact History.

In recent years, Atlanta has wrested away from Los Angeles the distinction of serving as the poster child for sprawl. According to critics of sprawl—uniformly seen in some quarters as an unmitigated disaster, an evil to be expunged—this means that Atlanta, like other fast-growing sprawling cities such as Houston, Dallas or Phoenix, suffers from an entire litany of problems: a drain on its economic vitality, a lack of mobility, social problems, environmental degradation, even obesity.

You would think from the commentary that Atlanta is flat on its back. In fact, of course, Atlanta, over the last half century, has obviously seen its population and its economy grow faster than most of the older, higher-density, more transit-oriented cities of the United States or Europe. It must be doing something right, perhaps including the way it has sprawled.


The most recent confirmation of Atlanta’s status as an icon of American sprawl comes in a new report from Smart Growth America called “ Measuring Sprawl 2014.” This group, which advocates for more compact development, has devised an index of sprawl based on an entire series of measures that includes things like residential and employment density, strength of downtown and activity centers and the accessibility of the street network. According to Smart Growth’s 2014 index the New York metropolitan area is America’s least, and the Atlanta metropolitan area the most, sprawling. This year’s report has occasioned a great deal of analysis nationwide and considerable handwringing among citizens of Atlanta, who cringe at what they perceive as negative publicity. It has intensified calls to put into practice “smart growth” provisions that would slow growth at the edge, increase densities at the center, reduce spending on roads and boost public transit.

A closer look at these diagnoses and prescriptions, however, suggests some problems with the analysis. Let’s take, for example, the issue that dominates most discussions of Atlanta and sprawl: traffic congestion. You would assume, from the rhetoric of smart-growth advocates, that traffic congestion increases as urban areas spread out. In fact, in general, and around the world, the exact reverse is true. As logic would suggest, traffic congestion tends to rise with increased density as long as a substantial percentage of the population drives and there is no public transit system capable of offsetting the increased density of people and trips. However, most trips in virtually all affluent urban areas worldwide are by private vehicle and public transportation, outside the very center of a few American cities, is a negligible factor in the overall transportation picture. The result, according to a wide range of data from organizations like the Texas Transportation Institute and INRIX, is that the greatest congestion and longest commuting times in this country, as elsewhere in the affluent world, tend to occur in the largest and densest urban areas like Paris or New York and the least congestion and shortest commuting times in lower-density areas like Phoenix or Kansas City.

It is true that Atlanta’s congestion is much worse than its low density might indicate. The reasons for this are complex, but two important ones jump to the eye. The first is that because of its irregulartopography and complex historic land-ownership patterns, Atlanta’s road system is choppy and disconnected. This would not be so problematic if the city had an adequate freeway system. However—and despite Atlanta’s reputation as a paradise for cars—this system is much less developed than it should be for a city its size, and it funnels a large percentage of traffic right through the heart of the city instead of diverting more of it around the center. The other reason traffic is so bad in Atlanta is because the urban area has grown so quickly. Compared with the Chicago metropolitan area, for example, whose population has grown less than 6 percent per decade since 1970, the population of the Atlanta metropolitan area has quadrupled in the same time period. Infrastructure almost always lags in places that experience extremely fast population and economic growth. In other words, traffic congestion is, in part, an almost inevitable by-product of Atlanta’s undeniable and enviable economic success.

In any case, the remedy for the problem of traffic congestion is not some massive transit-building program. Atlanta, in fact, already has more transit ridership per capita than most low-density cities in the United States, according to the Census Bureau. That transit is important in reaching a few key locations, notably downtown and the airport. Atlanta, like virtually every American city, would probably benefit from an expansion of the transit system, particularly to accommodate those who cannot, for one reason or another, drive. Even a major expansion, however, is unlikely to alter in any fundamental way the fact that most people except for those traveling to or from a few very dense nodes are going to do most of their travel by private automobile because in greater Atlanta, as in greater New York or greater Paris, the automobile is simply so much faster and more convenient everywhere except at the very center. A major expansion of the transit system wouldn’t even benefit most people who can’t drive because the jobs are already so scattered around the metropolitan area, and the poorest people can’t afford the fares. The most promising way to mitigate Atlanta’s traffic problems will be to expand road capacity at least at the rate of population growth and to take advantage of new technological advances in traffic management, telecommuting, driverless cars and shared vehicles that can be summoned on demand. These measures could dramatically expand the region’s transportation capacity.

The notion that Atlanta would be more economically viable or a more attractive place to live if it sprawled less appears to fly in the face of most of the evidence visible on the ground. Atlanta has been one of the most successful cities in the country in attracting population and jobs over the past 50 years. One of the main reasons for this growth is precisely because it is such a leafy, low-density place where middle-income home buyers have been able to afford a house with some land and home builders have been able to supply houses fast enough to meet demand so that house prices have remained fairly low. Call it the upside of sprawl. The same can be said of most of the most dynamic and lowest-density urban areas in the country— Houston, Dallas, Phoenix. It is certainly not true of many of the highest-density places in North America – urban areas such as San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto or even Los Angeles—where public policies aimed at curbing sprawl have led to sharply higher housing prices.

In fact, if we look globally across urban areas during the last century, a striking pattern emerges. According to Shlomo Angel and his colleagues in Planet of Cities and The Atlas of Urban Expansion and demographer Wendell Cox on his demographia.com website, even though densities are falling in almost every urban area in the world today, every poor urban area in the world continues to have very high densities by historic standards, usually more than 50,000 people per square mile. On the other hand, every affluent urban area in the world, with the single exception of Hong Kong, where land use has been more stringently controlled than in any Western democracy, has densities that are a fraction of typical urban densities one century ago. Where urban densities often topped 100,000 people per square mile in 1900, in the Atlanta today the figure currently stands at an exceptionally low 1,800 people per square mile. As people have become richer they have demanded more space, and they have gotten it everywhere there has been a truly democratic government and anything resembling a free market in land.

This historical background helps explain why Atlanta, as a city in the affluent world that has done most of its major expansion fairly recently, is such a sprawling place. It is possible that this pattern will change and that more people in Atlanta and throughout the affluent world will want to live at higher densities and be less dependent on automobiles. There is some evidence that this is already happening, especially in some of the fastest growing cities of the American South and West. However, it has been a conspicuous fact of urban life that many of the same people who deplore sprawl at the edge are also determined to preserve the character of their existing neighborhoods in the center, so it remains to be seen whether or not any affluent cities will ever return to the kinds of densities seen in 1950, let alone in the early 20th century.

The negative press on Atlanta seems to follow an interesting historical trend. Every time a city has shaken the urban order with very fast growth, growth fast enough to allow a large population to move up the American middle-class ladder, there has tended to be a chorus of complaints from an already well-established urban elite about all kinds of alleged urban ills, especially what they perceive as social and physical disorder in the city’s urban development. This was true in New York in the mid 19th century, Chicago in the late 19th century, Los Angeles in the early 20th century. Rudyard Kipling’s long rant against Chicago in 1891 (most memorable phrase: “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”) is typical.

There was, of course, some truth to the complaints of the critics, but for most of the families in those fast-growing cities, the vast expansion in social and economic opportunity vastly outweighed the problems. Eventually these urban areas, as they grew richer and the pace of development inevitably slowed, were able to alleviate some of the most glaring issues. This is probably what we will see in the case of Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Phoenix. In the meantime strident efforts to reverse the course of urban history and push these places back into the mold of dense 19th-century cities heavily dependent on public transportation risk destroying the very things that have made them such magnets for population and economic growth in the first place.