Anti-Sprawl Activists and Changing Patterns of Suburban Expansion: an Exploratory Analysis

二战后，随着北美人口规模和财富的增长，发生了大规模的景观变化，最明显的是在城市以外，农民、建筑商和银行家组成的松散联盟将农场和森林变成了独栋住宅的细分区域。对随之而来的环境破坏感到震惊的其他公民，组成了反联盟，开始反对房地产开发。反扩张活动人士试图通过开放空间保护和降级分区(增加房屋的最小地块面积)来阻止或减缓开发。我们对反联盟及其影响知之甚少。通过对四个具有代表性的社区的反蔓延活动人士的案例研究，以及对遥感和人口普查数据的相关区域分析，主要调查人员将解决关于反蔓延活动的原因和影响的两个关键问题。(1)什么样的社会经济和生态环境导致了反联盟；(2)他们保护乡村景观的努力对当地的生活质量有什么影响？人们的期望是，这项研究将证实存在一种新的、密度更低、经济上更具排他性的无序扩张，在这种扩张中，开放空间保护和降级分区同步进行，以减少新住房的数量，但不会减少最近开发的土地的数量。开放空间保护和向下分区之间的这种互动在欠发达、更富裕的社区将比在更发达的社区和小规模而不是大规模的保护努力更加明显。更广泛地说，这项研究回应了Duncan and Duncan(2001)和Teaford(1997)的观点，即城乡结合部社区的环境言论和行动往往掩盖了排他性社会议程的追求，并使其更容易被接受。在这方面，高地项目解决了环保主义者作为美国景观变革推动者的几个重要问题。

With growth in the size and wealth of North America's human population after World War II, massive landscape transformations occurred, most notably outside of cities where loose coalitions of farmers, builders, and bankers converted farms and forests into subdivisions of single family homes. Alarmed by the accompanying environmental destruction, other citizens, organized into counter coalitions, have begun to oppose real estate development. The anti-sprawl activists try to prevent or slow development through open space preservation and down-zoning (an increase in minimum lot areas for houses). We know little about counter coalitions and their effects. Through case studies of anti-sprawl activists in four representative communities and a linked regional analysis of remotely sensed and census data, the principal investigators will address two key questions about the causes and effects of anti-sprawl activism. (1) What sorts of socio-economic and ecological circumstances give rise to counter coalitions and (2) what effects do their efforts to preserve rural landscapes have on the local quality of life? The expectations are that the research will confirm the existence of a new, lower density, more economically exclusionary sprawl in which open space preservation and down-zoning work in tandem to reduce the amount of new housing but not the amount of recently developed land. This interaction between open space preservation and down-zoning will be more evident in less developed, more affluent communities than in more developed communities and in small scale rather than large scale preservation efforts. More generally, this research responds to the contention by Duncan and Duncan (2001) and Teaford (1997) that environmental rhetoric and action in rural-urban fringe communities often masks and makes more acceptable the pursuit of an exclusionary social agenda. In this respect the Highlands project addresses several important questions about environmentalists as agents of change in the American landscape.