State and Local Government Law Commons^™

Beyond City And Suburb: Thinking Regionally, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

“City” and “suburb” as they were known and debated in the twentieth century are no more. Increasingly, the key urban unit in metropolitan America is the region. Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History, a chronicle of the melding of city and suburban land use patterns, illustrates this development. Joel Kotkin’s The City: A Global History, which expresses concern about the loss of traditional urban distinctiveness, also reflects this. In her review of both books, Nicole Stelle Garnett appropriately raises issues of interlocal competition and equity, and the quality of urban life in metropolitan America, but she errs in framing them …