On dit souvent que l'étalement urbain a été inventé par les Américains. Or, saviez-vous que ce sont les citoyens de la Rome Antique qui sont les véritables pères de l'étalement urbain?
C'est ce que soutient Sprawl, un essai percutant qui vient de paraître dans les librairies américaines.
Pour lire un texte sur cet essai, cliquez sur ce lien.
Extrait:
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"Urban sprawl is not a recent phenomenon: It has been a feature of city life since the earliest times. The urban rich have always sought the pleasures of living in low-density residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities. As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. (…)
It appears that all cities-at least all cities in the industrialized Western world-have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal. Why is this significant?
"Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax," Bruegmann writes. "It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy. (…)"