A topic of interest to me over the first half of my Urban Planning course has been the idea of Urban Sprawl and how it affects us socially. Urban Sprawl is the unrestricted growth of urban and suburban areas. Typically this is in the context of low-density cities. The reason I was interested in this concept during our lectures was that this perfectly reflects how Albuquerque has expanded. Everything is so far apart, and low density, and on top of that, public transportation is not utilized as often as it should be by the urban population. Urban Sprawl is often characterized by its many abandoned parking lots, shopping centers, and by being car-centric in transportation design. We see a lot of this in Albuquerque, average sized shopping centers, with huge parking lots. On one hand, one does not want to have an inadequate amount of parking spaces, but on the other hand, the land could be utilized in a much more effective way than as a parking lot.

 

In Albuquerque, the intentional urban design seems like it has been an afterthought. Since Albuquerque is very spread out in its structure and has very strict differentiation of land uses (zoning) and very little mixed-use. it means that many people living in the suburbs often have to commute upwards of 20 minutes by car each morning to work or school. A center of activity during the work/school week is the University of New Mexico. It seems as if all traffic gets backed up heading towards the university. In addition, traffic always gets backed up along the parts of the freeway that cross the river. This is due to the fact that Albuquerque is still somewhat sprawling towards the west. Since many new housing developments are being created on the west side of Albuquerque, the traffic tends to get especially backed up crossing the river through the three major river intersections. It can be easy to say adding more jobs to this side of town would improve traffic conditions, but if it was that easy, then we would already have acted upon this.

 

Since Albuquerque has sprawled as much as it can directionally, the next step in population growth is increasing our density. This makes underutilized land very valuable since it is one of the major ways we can innovate and change Albuquerque. Many people say that this renovation a difficult task, but it really becomes quite simple when you factor in retrofitting. However, one should be aware of gentrification, and try to avoid gentrifying an area. Gentrification is the process of renovating an area to fit middle-class ideals, and with this, it drives out the prior tenants due to the skyrocketing of prices of housing in the area.

 

I believe that this binary social navigation is very much connected to this issue of gentrification in planning. I have recognized that they are tied together because our society likes to navigate on a binary scale. Binary social navigation is when something as seen as having two sides, and you’re either on one side or the other. However, I have noticed that as much as society pushes these two side narratives, social issues are much more complex than this. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and therefore everything is interconnected. This is why it would be more correct to go by the concept of a multi-actor social environment. Multi-actor social navigation is the concept that as individuals, we have multiple aspects that are a part of our identities. How this relates to the ideas of social issues, is that social issues are much more complex and interconnected that they seem to be on the surface.

 

As a future planner, I very much agree that this idea of multi-actor social navigation fits into the narrative of designing urban spaces. One must keep the area and the culture that they are planning for in mind. It is important to no erase the history of the people that are being built around. This ties into the idea of gentrification, which is an ever-increasing issue, as inflation rises while the minimum wage is not increased at a similar rate. Gentrification is when a housing area is renovated to middle-class ideals, and by the effect, the prices rise and drive out the prior residents. This is a major issue in urban planning, and it just goes back to this same idea that one must be aware of the culture of the area, and must be respectful to those that it belongs to.