across broad expanses of land. Houston’s gridded downtown fragmented into suburbs and exurbs—all of them defined by the new human appendage: the car. The changes wrought in the landscape and feel of Houston and other cities across the region would become the subject of controversy and debate. Denounced for their “urban sprawl,” these places would be derided by academics and the general population for a lack of planning deemed un-aesthetic, unenvironmental, and lacking in efficiency and equity.2 At the same time, others would defend this form of growth for providing economic mobility, privacy, and freedom of choice.3 But, whatever the effects of sprawl, its genesis was in its infrastructure. The roads, sewer systems, storm drains, and transportation systems that delineated the path of a city’s future growth also determined its culture by prescribing/proscribing the interactions of its inhabitants. These are the systems investigated by the artists in the first section of SPRAWL, “Infrastructure of Expansion.” Beginning with the highways, bridges, and trestles that enabled the great westward migration and continuing through to the complexity of the contemporary landscape, Dylan Beck, Julia Gabriel, Sara Pfau, E. Ryan Simmons, Dane Youngren, and Andrea Zeuner add texture and insight to this defining feature of the American landscape. Susie J. Silbert is an independent curator and design historian working in Brooklyn, New York. — 1. 2. 3.
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Alex Marshall, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2000), xiv. George Galster et al., “Wrestling Sprawl to the Ground: Defining and Measuring an Elusive Concept,” Housing Policy Debate 12, no. 4 (2001): 681. Robert Breugmann, “In Defense of Sprawl,” Forbes, June 11, 2007, http://www.forbes.com.