"The modern city is the most artificial and unlovely sight this planet affords," said auto pioneer Henry Ford, after watching his first Model T roll off an assembly line in 1908. "The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the city problem only by leaving the city."

Ford's popularization of the automobile allowed Americans to follow his advice on solving the "city problem," and since World War II, we have flocked to suburbia in droves. More than ninety percent of metropolitan-area population growth since 1950 has been in the suburbs, and today two out of three people live on the suburban fringes of urbanized areas, according to a new book by former journalist Anthony Flint.

This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America is based on stories Flint collected over sixteen years covering urban life, development, architecture, and transportation for The Boston Globe. The book, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006, offers an account of what has led to the country's seemingly continuous exodus into the anonymous "exurbs" and "boomburbs" at the outer edges of metropolises. This movement away from our cities, known as sprawl, is characterized by low-density development that disperses the population over the widest possible area, separating homes, shops, and workplaces so they are connected only by limited-access roadways. The suburban lures are plentiful at first—affordability, convenience, good schools, and a sense of safety and security. According to Flint, however, these enticements often come with ecologically destructive and financially unsustainable consequences—traffic congestion, higher gasoline costs, longer commutes to work, air and water pollution, global warming, increased obesity, endangered wildlife, and a loss of open space.

"Living in sprawl seems like a bargain at first, but it turns out that the lower sticker price of the home is eroded very quickly by what you're paying to keep the gas tank filled and to heat and cool a 3,000-square-foot home," says Flint. "This, along with other attractions of urbanism—the desire for a sense of community, the ability to walk to places as a matter of physical activity and personal health—has begun to prompt some consumers to rethink how they live."

In his book, Flint, now with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, introduces a number of alternatives to sprawl, collectively termed "smart growth." These alternatives advocate more compact, mixed-use development that reduces our reliance on cars. Smart growth also promotes the use of existing infrastructure rather than the construction of additional roads, sewer lines, and water pipes. In essence, the smart growth movement campaigns for using land to its fullest potential.

These ideas are not new to Maryland, which Flint says served as one of the earliest proving grounds for smart growth policy.

"You couldn't write a book about smart growth without devoting a chunk to Maryland," he says. The state has been a sponsor of growth management since the 1960s, and while Marylanders have mixed feelings about the success of smart growth initiatives in the state, national experts continue to recognize that Maryland leaders began thinking about and attempting to curtail sprawl before most other state's officials had defined the problem. Flint discusses several of the state's smart growth projects in his book.

In 1997, then-governor Parris Glendening, an influential but controversial figure in the smart growth movement, established an Office of Smart Growth to oversee the state's general development policy and launched the Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiative, in an attempt to make Maryland a leader in smart growth policy. The program included policies to redirect state money to "priority funding areas" to help maintain and improve infrastructure in existing communities, and a farmland-preservation program to protect rural areas from being turned into subdivisions.

"[Glendening] pushed a policy under which builders paid for water, sewer, and other infrastructure in undeveloped areas, while developers in places that were already built up got a streamlined permitting process and reduced fees," Flint describes. "Since Glendening came on the scene in Maryland, some three dozen governors have talked about growth management … and ten states have formed task forces or passed executive orders or legislation dealing with growth."

Although Glendening's policies helped bring key development issues and the concept of smart growth to light in Maryland, the reality is that implementation has been slow and the few outcomes have been largely disappointing. Flint argues that smart growth initiatives need to "get into the DNA" of development and be actively pursued and executed rather than just included in a development plan that "sits on a shelf." Almost ten years later, Marylanders are still debating the true effect of Glendening's efforts to curb sprawl in the state.

"To bring about something other than conventional suburban development, you're really turning a supertanker," Flint says. "It's my impression that Glendening's Office of Smart Growth and the policies and procedures he put in place just started to make a dent in solving sprawl in Maryland."
 
With a population surge of nearly 1.5 million expected to hit Maryland in the next twenty-five years, the state now faces the challenge of determining how to "get into the DNA" of development quick enough to avoid inducing more sprawl. With its vacant homes and existing infrastructure, Baltimore City, and "anywhere there is an existing town and town center," is an ideal place to absorb a substantial amount of this growth, and Flint encourages use of the state's priority funding areas as a foundation for intelligently distributing this growth.

Toward the end of his book, Flint rightly recognizes the challenges of living in the city—challenges that many Baltimoreans are all too familiar with: an underperforming public school system, high property taxes, and high crime rates. These problems, left unchecked, will continue to dissuade some people, especially families, from moving back into the city. Flint recommends looking to programs that encourage homeownership and development of vacant lots in urban neighborhoods, but concedes that the smart growth movement has some additional work to do in developing real solutions for these issues.

"The central challenge now of the smart growth movement is finding a way for a range of people, including middle-class families, to be able to afford and feel comfortable living in revitalized cities and older suburbs," says Flint.

With the continuing rise in transportation and energy costs, Flint concludes that the state will soon see additional consumer demand for more mixed-use, compact urban environments, and Maryland's job will be to accommodate those looking for a more sustainable way to live.

"A number of people are looking at smart growth not as something that's the right thing to do or something we need to do because of global warming—it is, by the way, something that we need to do because of global warming—but as something to pave the way for, because it's just going to be much more in demand," says Flint. "There's really no sacrifice here; this is just how people want to live in the future."