Solving Urban Sprawl: the NewVistas way
Urban sprawl is a big problem. It causes pollution, which makes our environment less appealing to live in, and diseases that claim lives, and economic resources in wasted time and treatment. Urban sprawl dilutes economic power, affects social cohesion, and impedes access to essential services.
It is therefore a no-brainer that such a phenomenon should be mitigated aggressively. What sprawl also provides – a sense of security and space, an avenue to own property, and jobs for construction companies – means that mitigating it is not a straightforward affair. Rather, tackling sprawl has strong political and social undertones that necessitate a more holistic approach that considers all elements outlined above.
Current responses to sprawl, including new urbanism and smart growth, see walkability as an important element of mitigating sprawl. They also see less dependence on cars, less invasive physical infrastructure, and organic growth of cities as essential in tackling sprawl. The NewVistas response goes several steps further. It eliminates the need to own a home – a major driver of sprawl – from the equation of improving a person’s net worth. It advocates for the adoption of dense, community-owned living spaces while appreciating the essential role that technology plays in achieving livability. Here, we discuss some of the main aspects of the NewVistas pattern concerning urban sprawl.
Design issues of current sprawl
The cul-de-sac is the symbol of suburban America. 1 To understand how American urban sprawl grew to unsustainable levels, it is necessary to learn what people were looking for in the suburbs, and why they thought the cul-de-sac should somehow help.
It has been argued that inner cities were, before they became depopulated and desolate, too loud, and offered little privacy for residents. They were insecure, with “strangers” easily getting in and potentially committing crimes. The streets could be used by pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles with abandon, making them less safe for children. It was argued then, that gated communities with only a few peer families living together in seclusion would help foster a greater community spirit.
Whether or not these assumptions or talking points by the fathers of urban sprawl are true or not is subject to much debate. What we do know, however, is that cul-de-sacs made it difficult, if not impossible, for small businesses such as grocery stores to laundry shops to exist in such a neighborhood, which has no space specifically designed for such businesses, neither the customer flow needed to sustain them.
Stand-alone townhouses meant that more space was used. This space could only be found in formerly agricultural land. The speculative nature of modern land ownership has often meant that development usually leapfrogs vacant land, where the owner is probably holding out for a better deal or has no current plans to develop such land.
While our population has steadily grown over the years, our cities’ density has decreased. Some cities are growing at more than four times the population increase, leading to an unsustainable land grab that increasingly jeopardizes our ability to feed ourselves and conserve the environment.
Enhancing walkability
In the years before automobiles became a mainstay on our streets, people mostly walked from their homes to work and back. In 1750, for instance, London was only 5 miles from side to side. 2 This was easily walkable by most people. The city had grown to more than 30 miles in 1950 and had changed from an industrial center to becoming more service-oriented.

While the growth in size and population reflects economic prosperity, it also means that people no longer live where they work – that is unless they live in small mixed-use compartments that are largely semi-autonomous, with each division easily providing most goods and services that the residents need.
Today, most cities around the world are dominated by wide streets with vehicular traffic. This is especially so in the US, where practically every family owns a personal car. There are two reasons why American car ownership is so high compared to peer countries. Cars are more affordable, being subjected to less punitive taxes that outrightly dissuade car ownership, and their necessity – it is impossible to operate in most places without a car to run most errands.
NewVistas envisages the development of easily walkable downtowns and residential areas – a community is 1.44 mile wide, from end to end. By having the longest distance one can walk at only one mile, people can easily run their errands without the aid of s vehicle.
The design of modern roads – wide enough to have as many lanes as possible, intersections to avoid congestion, and without any pedestrian walks in many cases – makes them hostile to walking. In the NewVistas community, however, such streets are not for vehicular traffic. They have used “breezeways” pedestrian and cycling lanes, and gardens where communities can plant fruits and trees to improve air quality, ambiance, and access to fresh fruits.
Each intersection need not have spaghetti interchanges which make it impossible for pedestrians to cross. Instead, they are an opportunity for more greenery, though it could host facilities like helipad, or n informal playground.
The lack of cars also makes it easy for cyclists to move about. Cycling lanes that go one way also ensure minimal interference with people moving around on foot. For those who might need motorized traffic, an ingenious means of transport – the MULE, is at hand. 3 It can transport people and goods and is fully automated. This way, the congestion usual in today’s streets is eliminated.
Density without congestion
In many respects, London is a prime example of what happens when a city develops too fast, without visionary planning to cater to an exploding population. Between 1750 and 1850, London’s population rose from 740,000 to more than 3.1 million people. The sudden rise brought with it monumental challenges. Public sanitation was a problem, with the people turning the Thames into a river of sewerage that they also depended on for drinking water. As the city got bigger physically, horse-dawn carts became the order of the day for the middle and upper classes. At one point, horses dumped up to a thousand tons of excrement per day. There was no centralized authority to clear this mess, turning the streets into muddy, smelly affairs that were very hostile for pedestrians. 4
It is perhaps the experiences of London and other cities that lead us to tie high density with poor living conditions. In New York, for example, overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and dirty streets meant that New York saw the same mortality rates as medieval England, even with illustrious medical advances. Poor living conditions in inner cities were often blamed on high density, rather than the absence of innovation to maximize space use, waste disposal, and enhanced comfort. It is no surprise, therefore, that the flight from cities that have fueled sprawl meant houses were bigger, more sparsely concentrated, and built on bigger plots.

NewVistas however shows that we can achieve high density without all the problems associated with it. For instance, housing modules can be stacked upon each other, and enable up to 42 households to live comfortably in the same space that is usually used today for single detached houses. The 42 households, which make up an apartment, can be scaled up to villages, districts, and communities that can hold up to 100,000 people in a square mile.
To avoid the problems that we have seen above that come with density, NewVistas greatly reduces the scope of waste management systems from the municipal level to the household. Black and grey water can easily be treated at the household level, eliminating the need for central sewer systems. The use of electricity grids is also eliminated, the process resulting in enormous savings by eliminating transmission losses, and power distribution infrastructure.
Mixed development
City walls were once a mainstay in most cities around the world – London, Rome, Munich, Paris, and even Tulum in Central America. The walling of cities was meant for protection and administration. However, it also meant that most of the economic and social activities that residents needed were to be found within the city. Activities including agriculture, hunting, and later, mining, were done outside the city walls, but there was no protection there from bandits and enemy armies.
With time, walls became too inhibitive, and their efficacy in protecting settlements dwindled in the face of advanced military technological innovations. For a time, however, the inability to guarantee security beyond the walls meant that communities had to conduct all their activities in practically the same place, with most walled cities measuring less than 4 square miles. 5
The concentration of different activities in one place was not practical as the industrial revolution gathered steam. In London, the air became sooty, and in several other towns, lead poisoning became extremely common. Noise pollution was also growing to unmanageable levels, demanding the need for zoning. Zoning worked, to a large extent. People no longer lived next door to factories. With time, residential areas were segregated too. Instead of living on the first floor and having an office on the ground floor, you now had to get into the central business district.
Excessive zoning, where areas are exclusively set aside for only one function, has meant that over time, people have to live further and further away from their places of work. It has led to sprawl, with people traveling extensive distances – more than 30 miles one way in some instances, to get from home to work.
NewVistas appreciates the importance of zoning and mixed development. Some activities cannot be sustainably done within the city center or downtown. Farming, mining, and most forms of manufacturing are incompatible with an active human residence. These activities are located on the edge of a community, where individual villages and community participants can rent land blocks. Within the community, street intersections serve as hubs, where most commercial activity occurs, and therefore, where most jobs are located.
Besides the hubs, the administration block buildings are designed to be multifunctional. They can variously be used as assembly halls, hotel rooms, offices, and classes at different times. This gives people the chance to live their lives without the need to move great distances with transport aids such as cars.
The community design is easily scalable from a single household module to a megalopolis. The diamond design of a community enables the optimal use of space preventing strip development as is common along major roads. With optimal land use, environmental conservation is much easier, since human interference through farming and physical development is unnecessary.
Urban design
The absence of roads in the modern sense frees up significant amounts of land for other uses, especially the integration of the natural environment into towns. Pavements, buildings, and roads absorb and retain heat during warmer seasons. The heat leads to makes cities urban heat islands, where the average temperature is significantly higher than in areas outside town, but with similar climatic conditions. The higher temperatures increase energy costs due to the need for air conditioning. It also contributes significantly to air pollution, with all the attendant challenges to public health. 6
Instead of concrete and tarmac roads, the community features trees. These trees significantly purify the air, while providing a source of fresh fruit that is starkly lacking in today’s cities. The landscaping and tending to these trees are done by a dedicated agency for urban planning and management.
Changing property ownership
For the last several decades, home ownership has been seen as a great means of creating wealth by improving a household’s net worth. As prime land on which to build or acquire a house quickly ran out, people turned to undeveloped land, which was cheaper. The desire for home ownership was fueled by the economic structure which tied financial progress and success to the ownership of physical property. 7
Today, home ownership levels are dropping. The drop is not the result of changing attitudes to ownership, but a product of economic circumstances, whereby people find that they cannot afford homes with the same ease their parents did. Appreciating property prices also mean people have to work for longer hours and wait more years before they can acquire their first home. They are also unlikely to retire in these homes, as their improving finances motivate them to look for bigger houses. These issues greatly contribute to urban sprawl, as people seek to move further out to secure self-owned homes.
NewVistas proposes to scrap this system altogether. All physical infrastructure in the community is owned by the community. Individuals, upon joining the community, are required to pay up US$ 20,000. These funds represent their net worth and investment in the community. Through its various agencies, the community invests the money and generates a return that is paid to the participant. A proportion of the interest (10%) settles community welfare costs.
By making homeownership as a means of generating wealth obsolete, NewVistas manages to invest resources where they can generate maximum return, without tying them down to land and homes that have little chance of generating revenue. By controlling physical development, the community can provide an optimal life-work balance, as opposed to the current scenario where people spend up to 4 hours per day in traffic and have little time for themselves or their families.
Conclusion
The unsustainability of the current rate of urban sprawl, coupled with the political, social, and economic undertones that make the de-escalation of sprawl difficult, call for a new perspective to address the issues at hand. we have already seen that sprawl affects the environment, economic prosperity, and the environment. On the other hand, it gives people the chance to acquire affordable houses and creates jobs for construction companies and workers.
Legislation has so far failed to mitigate sprawl. Nearly every other intervention has had, at best, modest results in curbing the phenomenon. The issue might be tied to these interventions’ inability to prescribe a holistic solution that will address the issues while giving stakeholders meaningful solutions to enable them to cope with an end to sprawl. NewVistas compellingly does this, however. It gives people access to wealth, good health, privacy, and the chance to foster meaningful social connections.
References and further reading
Distel, Marshall B. “Connectivity, Sprawl, and the Cul-de-sac: An Analysis of Cul-de-sacs and Dead-end Streets in Burlington and the Surrounding Suburbs.” (2015).
Đorđe Petrović, Radomir Mijailović, Dalibor Pešić. “Traffic Accidents with Autonomous Vehicles: Type of Collisions, Manoeuvres and Errors of Conventional Vehicles’ Drivers”, Transportation Research Procedia 45 (2020): 161-168.
Rizwan, Ahmed Memon, Leung YC Dennis, and L. I. U. Chunho. “A review on the generation, determination and mitigation of Urban Heat Island.” Journal of environmental sciences 20.1 (2008): 120-128.
Tong, C. O., and S. C. Wong. “The advantages of a high density, mixed land use, linear urban development.” Transportation 24.3 (1997): 295-307.
- Cul-de-sac designs reduce social cohesion and connectivity. They also inhibit walkability due to the distance and the unfriendly nature of their layout. Streets that have a grid layout with intersections every few feet are seen as enhancing security, connectivity, and walkability.[↩]
- London grew fast in the 18th and 19th centuries due to the turmoil in Europe and the city’s pull as an economic hub. In only 10 years, the physical area occupied to the city had quadrupled, brining in the necessity of horse-drawn carriages for the upper classes. Their unregulated nature, and the mess they left I ntheir wake made London streets dangerous and hostile for pedestrians.[↩]
- It is increasingly clear that automated vehicular traffic is the future. Automated traffic has the potential to drastically reduce road accidents, which are mainly the result of human error. They will also result in lower direct carbon emissions, though secondary emmissions related to the generation of the power used to drive them are still not clear. Automated traffic will additionally minimize traffic. These possibilities will be incorporated in the NewVistas transport system, in the form of MULEs.[↩]
- Liveability and density can be combined ,and with great results. It however requires technological innovation and scientific planning. Blending green areas with compact development also helps, with proper, localized, means of waste disposal and service provision (water, energy, and other amenities).[↩]
- Mixed urban development necessitates high-quality design to provide flexibility and control over infrastructure. Mixed development enhances social interactions, with different functions being located closer together and therefore enhancing not just walkability, but also greater economic activity and. Housing opportunities and choices are more in mixed urban development, as opposed to monologous town houses in far-flung areas with little input or chance of flexibility for potential occupants.[↩]
- Design and planning parameters are essential in reducing the intensity of UHI. This includes having more green areas, consciously desiging roads, buildings, and pavements to minimize re-radiation from these structures, and more proactive monitoring of the phenomenon to intervene as needed. Citing Seoul city authorities, The New York reports that the Cheonggyecheon has reduced temperatures in the nearby areas by 3.60C, and reduced small-particle air pollution by around 26 micrograms per cubic meter.[↩]
- Australian data suggests that by promoting access to affordable homes through subsidies, we only create more sprawl. A system that promotes resource sharing, full occupancy where possible, and a move away from home ownership as the only way of generating wealth should instead by pursued.[↩]