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After staring it on our bookshelves for almost 2 years, I finally sat down with Dolores Hayden’s book “A Field Guide to Sprawl” this afternoon. I love some of the phrases various people have coined to describe everything we stand against. We’ve all seen this stuff… it’s horrid. Here’s a few that stood out:

Pork Chop Lot
An interior lot requiring a long driveway to reach the main part of the property… pork chop lots signify sprawl because they indicate pressure to sell farmland.

Power Center
Several unconnected big box outlets combine to use the drawing power of multiple discount stores. Cheaper to build than an enclosed mall, these category-killers tend to destroy business for retail malls and older Main Streets.

Putting Parsley Round the Pig
landscape (attributed to landscape architect Martha Schwartz). Landscaping a bad spot or a bad project… efforts to soften unfriendly landscapes, roads or buildings.
Snout House
Houses where its difficult to see residents’ activities since the protruding garages take up most of the street frontage.
Starter Castle
Custom-designed homes “of exaggerated size and aspirations, a play on “starter house,” a house for first-time home buyers. A hallmark of “conspicuous consumption.” Sometimes a starter castle is built on the site of a tear-down, an older house, usually in a desirable neighborhood, purchased for its lot value and demolished in order to build a larger structure.

Theming
Theme—first a noun and then an adjective—has recently been used as a verb. Theming describes designing and decorating restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, casinos and even small towns to exaggerate stereotypes and re-create lost places. Example: the Cheesecake Factory on Arden.

TOAD
An acronym for a temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict site. “Toads owe their onground existence to the use, abandonment, and reuse of real estate as exaggerated by a capitalistic system…. may be abandoned shopping malls, empty big boxes or closed industrial sites. ”

Tract Mansion
A large, expensive house (usually over 4,000 sq. ft.) constructed among homes that are very similar by a subdivider who builds on speculation.” Also called “McMansions” (coined by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, where the “preferred style” is Grotesquely Grandiose”, developers offer a mind-boggling mix of Rapunzel towers, pretend Palladian, Jacuzzis and surround-sound.” A tract mansion may also be called a twenty-minute house because a realtor shows it quickly—all of the builder’s energy has been focused on the front. “A house on steroids”

Boomburg
Coined by Robert Lang and Patrick Simmons. A rapidly growing, urban-sized place in the suburbs. Fast-growing sub-urban cities. Natomas, CA.

Zoomburb.
A place growing faster than a boomburg. Sun City, Arizona.

Pod.
An area of single-use zoning (such as a shopping center or residential subdivision) located off a major road. The term may have derived from peas in the pod or from the pod people in the classic film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Long-winding roads that go nowhere characterize “dead-worm subdivisions,” places with multiple pods. A pod is often a cul-de-sac… or perhaps a group of them. The convoluted road layout caused by multiple single-use pods makes it difficult to go from one place to another.

LULU
A locally unwanted land use. Creates a problem for people because of the way it looks, smells, sounds or pollutes the environment. A LULU may be an everyday project such as a parking lot. LULU’s often end up in communities without the political clout to resist them.

Litter on a Stick.
A billboard. Over half a million billboards line major highways in America.

Jason