Ever since population centers in Britain and America shifted from the countryside to cities with the rise of industrialization, the social and economic problems that accompany urbanization have been a prime concern of writers in the Anglo-American tradition. In particular, critics and reformers have focused their attention on the inequality that often accompanies industrialization, advancing various proposals for ameliorating socioeconomic divisions. Central to these divisions has been geographic separation, with more affluent metropolitanites abandoning central cities for the suburban fringe. This process of suburbanization in the Anglo-American world began a couple of hundred years ago, and planners and other urbanists have been characterizing the phenomenon as “sprawl” since the middle of the twentieth century. Yet urban sprawl may never before have alarmed observers to the extent it has in the past decade.