[pip]

Originally Posted by craigs

Atlanta's sprawl was intentional. It was purpose-built to be the low-density, car-centric suburban sprawl that we see today.

That is not generally true of Boston's sprawl. First settled in the 1600s and 1700s, most of the area we now consider metropolitan Boston was already settled. Farms, villages, towns, cities, institutions--they were everywhere, and they operated independently of Boston's commuter shed for, in many cases, over three centuries. For example, the town where my parents met was first settled in 1651 and multiple industries (textiles, shoes, baseballs) came and went in the three centuries before it became part of suburban Boston. It was not built to be, nor did it function as, a suburb of Boston until the big land developers began constructing modern tract homes between the historic areas in the 1960s. It is an accidental suburb, as is so much of today's "sprawl" outside Boston.

How and where Boston could expand its commuter shed in recent decades was dictated by that historic quilt consisting of patches of towns, villages, cities, conservation land, colleges, hospitals and other institutions and stitched together by a colonial road network and 19th century rail system. The regional commuter shed eventually grew with white-collar employment and swallowed up those independent communities, filling the interstices with suburban housing tracts and modern highways.

Today's sprawl outside of Boston was not intended to be what it has become. Atlanta's surely was.

Medfield?

Newton where I grew up is 1630. Not turning it into a contest but it does show the history of suburban build. My brother lives in Brookline now which I feel is one of the best suburbs in America.