Urban Sprawl In Albuquerque

In Community and Regional Planning, a concept that stuck out to me was urban sprawl and smart growth. Urban sprawl is the expansion of human populations away from urban cities. Urban sprawl results in the development of unused land for low-density, single purpose development, leading to urban, developed space becoming obsolete. Urban sprawl is taxing on the environment and natural resources. Increased water usage, need for electricity/energy usage, increase in carbon emissions are a package deal with urban sprawl. Many people that have moved to suburban expansion sites commute to work in the central urban center of the city by car. The single purpose use of suburban communities make living without a car nearly impossible, due to the need to commute. On the other hand, smart growth is the expansion of land that has multiple uses, is more dense, and is walkable for pedestrians. Smart growth expansion is less taxing on the environment, and would be more sustainable for future developments than typical urban sprawl.

I found this topic to be interesting due to the prime example of the westward expansion of Albuquerque. Due to the fact that Albuquerque is surrounded by the Sandia Mountain to the east, Sandia Pueblo to the north, and the Isleta Pueblo to the south, the only option for expansion is west. This has resulted in suburban west side communities such as Rio Rancho, Taylor Ranch, Ventana Ranch, etc. These communities are made to accommodate vehicles rather than pedestrians. This has increased carbon emissions are the use of vehicles has risen. I am curious to see how Albuquerque continues to develop, and sprawl across the west side. What impact will this have on the urban center, or the environment that is being developed on? This is a ‘wicked problem’ for Albuquerque. What are possible solutions for this wicked problem? Perhaps, we should take a step back and re-evaluate Albuquerque and what the community is comprised of.

In class, we touched on Community Based Asset Mapping. Community asset mapping is a tool that is used to help one assess the current state of their community and what it contains. There are three different types of assets that a community can contain. There are human assets, which pertain to everything within a community that people utilize, such as school and work, stores, churches, and food sources. Another type of asset, environmental assets, include power sources, wild space, and water sources. The last type of asset is a community asset. These assets involve the community and how they utilize human and environmental assets and how they structure their identities around them.

Community Based Asset Mapping as an idea really resonated with me because I am fascinated because it changed the way I began to think of community. My preconceived notion of community was single-faced, human assets, such as people who lived in the community. Asset mapping led me to dissect what I thought of community, and took me down the ‘rabbit hole.’ There are so many different aspects and features that make up a community. I began to really think about the relationships that we have with human, environment, and community assets. In particular, I was fascinated by our identities/emotional connections and how we structure them around all of these assets. Emotional connection gives us a sense of place within our communities. I began to think about the communities where I have lived and assessed which assess they had or were lacking. What assets do we have in Albuquerque? Which ones are we lacking? Answering these questions could be the solutions to the our 'wicked problems' in our communities such as urban sprawl.