Grady Gammage, Jr. is a Senior Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and Senior Fellow at ASU’s Morrison Institute of Public Policy. He also teaches at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and at the W.P. Carey School of Business at ASU. Gammage is also a practicing lawyer, a real estate developer, and a former elected official.
There exists a category of American cities in which the line between suburban and urban is almost impossible to locate. These suburban cities arose in the last half of twentieth-century America, based largely on the success of the single-family home, shopping centers, and the automobile. The low-density, auto-centric development of suburban cities, which are largely in the arid West, presents challenges for urban sustainability as it is traditionally measured.