| Attempts to limit suburban sprawl by publicizing its social, economic, environmental, and health problems have not been effective. An important aspect of this ongoing appeal of sprawl is its promise of ideal community. The discourse of ideal community in advertisements for housing developments in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, echoes discursive constructions by Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant. Sprawl is therefore another attempt to solve a problem in political thought that originates with the polis, namely, how to envision, authorize, construct, and secure the best possible space, form, and practice of human organization. By constructing secure political community as the physical embodiment of metaphysical truth, a necessary but impossible resolution between nature and culture, this discourse constructs the central problem of politics as unsolvable. Thus the intractability of sprawl needs to be understood as a political problematic where the act of imposing a solution regenerates the original problem. |
