Perverse Cities: Hidden Subsidies, Wonky Policy and Urban Sprawl

by Pamela Blais

ISBN 9780774818964 $39.95 | Available: July 1, 2011

Perverse Cities provides a provocative explanation for the persistence of urban sprawl, pointing to flawed public policies and distorted price signals

Urban sprawl – low-density subdivisions and business parks, big box stores and mega-malls – has increasingly come to define city growth despite decades of planning and policy. Urban planning has focused on curbing sprawl by treating its symptoms – aiming to regulate more compact, liveable urban forms into being. Most urbanists view sprawl as an expensive and unsustainable pattern of development. Yet a few defend it as the natural expression of the market neutrally responding to consumer demand and as a reflection of consumers’ lifestyle preferences.

In Perverse Cities, Pamela Blais argues that both views fail to recognize market distortions and flawed policy that drive sprawl. She shows that, as a result of crude public policies, a wide range of urban goods and services are subject to inaccurate price signals, including housing, non-residential properties, transportation and utilities. Mis-pricing creates hidden, “perverse” subsidies and incentives that promote sprawl while discouraging more efficient and sustainable urban forms – clearly not what most planners and environmentalists have in mind.

Perverse Cities makes the case that accurate pricing and better policy are fundamental to curbing sprawl and shows how this can be achieved in practice through a range of market-oriented tools that promote efficient, sustainable cities. This year, it was shortlisted for the prestigious Donner Prize, an award granted to the best book on Canadian public policy. The Donner Jury had this to say about the book, “it is analytical and detailed in its approach…consistently daring in challenging accepted views of the causes of and solutions for urban sprawl,” stated the Donner jury.

Pamela Blais is a city planner and principal of Toronto-based Metropole Consultants.