Urban Sprawl

This week we talked about urban sprawl which began with most people living in the inner city and those cities growing to accommodate the needs of their people to people fleeing the city once it was overcrowded and had high crime rates. Those leaving were mostly white, affluent families who were leaving for their own plot of land and a house in a car-reliant community in the suburbs of the city they had just fled from. This left the cities with all these programs and space that had been established and built to accommodate the growing number of people living in the city. Without that many people to use the resources or the money from the affluent families to help operate these programs may of them closed. The urban sprawl that this created is out of control, we as Americans think we must develop every plot of land we can get our hands on and this mainly leads back to capitalism and consumerism which was beginning to grow during this time period as credit cards started to become a financial trend and would give people access to an amount of money they’ve never had before to make any kind of purchase their heart desires. It’s interesting how urban sprawl and white flight relate back into consumerism and capitalism as this is something we know of today but has become so normalized we don’t bat an eye.