From Alligator to Zoomburb

WHEN IT COMES TO defining sprawl, most people fall back on a version of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: They know it when they see it.

That wasn't good enough for Dolores Hayden. While researching her 2003 book "Building Suburbia," Hayden, a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale, became frustrated by her own lack of a ready vocabulary to describe the strange new man-made forms emerging on the American landscape. Planners had come up with various definitions of sprawl, but they were mainly statistical and hard for the average person to grasp. And so Hayden began combing through reference books, professional literature, and news accounts for the kind of lively slang definitions that could cut through the often foggy jargon of planners and bureaucrats.

The result is her "Field Guide to Sprawl," an eye-popping compendium of 51 "built conditions" and the memorable terms that describe them, from "alligator" (a bad speculative investment that's gobbling up cash) to "zoomburb" (an ultra-fast-growing urban-sized area in the suburbs, such as Sun City, Ariz., shown above).

Paging through Hayden's book is a bit like cruising along on your regular morning commute and then suddenly realizing you're not quite sure where you are or how you got there. Big boxes (think Home Depot) and tank farms (think of the East Boston waterfront) are familiar enough. But LULUs? Pork chop lots? Privatopias? Ruburbs? Where did this stuff come from? And is it too late to make a U-turn?

We were sprawling long before we had a word for it. Late 19th-century writers complained about the overbuilding spawned by railroads and trolleys that took middle- and upper-class commuters to the edge of the city. By the late 1940s and early `50s, Hayden says, sprawl had entered the lexicon, but no one could decide just whose problem it was. "People in cities would speak of suburban sprawl as something they disliked, and people in suburbs would speak about urban sprawl as something they disliked," she said in a recent phone interview from Provence, where she was enjoying a largely sprawl-free vacation.

But these days, sprawl is everybody's problem. Residents of Camden, Maine, for example, may be surprised to find an image of their postcard-perfect town center sandwiched between the horrors of the Las Vegas strip and deepest red-state exurbia. Such "Valhallas" (the term was coined by journalist Joel Kotkin), Hayden explains, may seem the very antithesis of sprawl. But they often attract wealthy homebuyers, giving rise to a cycle of teardowns, "starter castles" -- and sprawl.

These images, Hayden writes, "should be read as the material representation of a political economy organized around unsustainable growth." Still, for all its reformist spirit (for starters, Hayden proposes a drastic reduction in the sprawl-feeding home mortgage interest deduction), her book is something of a guilty pleasure. Thanks to noted aerial photographer Jim Wark, just about everything looks great from 5,000 feet. Most of us, however, travel by car, and there, precisely, is the rub. "`A Field Guide to Sprawl' should be in the glove compartment of every single-occupancy vehicle," Armando Carbonell of the Cambridge-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy writes in his introduction. But even if all you're driving this summer is an armchair, Hayden's book makes an ideal companion.