Part One of the Understanding Urbanization Series For generations, people have moved to communities like ours searching for something they could no longer find somewhere else. Open spaces. Clean water. Wildlife. Neighborhoods where children could ride bicycles. Roads that were not always crowded. Communities with room to breathe. Overtime, many of those same communities begin changing. More development. More traffic. More pavement. More congestion. More pressure on schools, u

Part 2 of the Understanding Urbanization Series How Did We Get Here? Communities were not always cities. Long before highways, shopping centers, and subdivisions, people gathered where life was sustainable. They settled near rivers, lakes, harbors, fertile farmland, and coastlines that provided food, transportation, and opportunity. Most early communities were small. People walked to work. Children walked to school. Local merchants knew their customers by name. The surroundin

Part 3 of the Understanding Urbanization Series When Growth Keeps Spreading Out By now we know that urbanization is the process by which communities grow and change over time. But not all growth happens in the same way. One common pattern of growth is called urban sprawl. Urban sprawl occurs when development spreads outward across previously undeveloped land. Instead of existing neighborhoods becoming more connected and efficient, new subdivisions continue moving farther into

Part 4 of the Understanding Urbanization Series Welcome to Sardinville Urbanization describes how communities grow. Urban sprawl describes one pattern of that growth. But what happens when the pace of development begins to overwhelm the very qualities that made a community special? At Life of a Sardine, we call that Sardinization™. Sardinization™ is not a planning term found in textbooks. It is a teaching term created to help citizens visualize what happens when growth, densi