Low-density peripheral sprawl threatens to bleed together one amorphous artificial territory after another along the entire swath of the Front Range (technically the corridor from Trinidad, Colorado to Cheyenne, Wyoming).
O beautiful for spacious skies,

for amber waves of grain,

for purple mountain majesties

above the fruited plain!

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee,

and crowned thy good

with brotherhood

from sea to shining sea!

Katherine Lee Bates, ‘America the Beautiful’ (first verse) 1893, inspired by the view from Pikes Peak over Colorado Springs

‘The worst enemy of modern architecture is the idea of space considered solely in terms of its economic and technical exigencies, indifferent to the ideas of the site. The built environment that surrounds us is, we believe, the physical representation of its history, and the way in which it has accumulated different levels of meaning to form the specific quality of the site, not just for what it appears to be in perceptual terms, but for what it is in structural terms.’

The string of flatland communities that edge up against the mountains are about to completely engulf the urban centers of Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo creating a homogeneous territory. The resultant culture is one best described by Anthony Vidler, ‘where suburb, strip and urban center have merged indistinguishably into a series of states of mind.’ 1

Colorado’s imagery of the soaring snow-capped peaks of the Rockies, sparkling mountain streams, waving fields of alpine flowers, majestic arid canyons and mesas threatens to be replaced by ‘sellscapes’ 2,

networks of infrastructure and hordes of planned, often gated, communities. The mythical western frontier, the outdoor adventurer’s paradise is systematically being transformed into a manufactured landscape, littered with architectural debris.

The American dream of a detached home in the middle of a grassy lawn continues to be cleverly marketed. The resultant implications of this car- dependent, land-consumptive, throw-away culture are appalling. The bedroom warehouse communities require erroneous, decentralized infrastructures and public services in addition to the massive ‘containers’ (museums, stadiums, shopping malls, theme parks, tourist centers, and convention centers) upon which the consensus consumer culture metres financial and societal success.

In an aggressive advertisement campaign, promoting public transport, the Regional Transportation Department (RTD) has provokingly posed the state capitol of Denver as the future ‘LA of the Rockies.’ Reality could be worse, whereas Los Angeles has density. The placeless megalopolis of Phoenix, Arizona is a far more daunting direction in which the Front Range may be heading.

WHY COLORADO ?

Colorado, the eight largest state in the US, was first settled by the Anazasi Indians in the sixth century. Presentday Colorado traces its history to the 1858 discovery of gold in the foothills west of Denver. Therein commenced a mining epoch that would last four decades. Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs became supply camps for miners and boom and bust cycles were the norm as minerals prices fluctuated. By 1870 the railroad had begun to link Colorado to the nation.

The great Continental Divide, the western barrier of the mountains, was penetrated. Also during this decade, corporations were formed to build and manage irrigation systems and this effort began to pay off in the 1890s, when tin cans, refrigeration and improved transport allowed for export of agriculture.

In 1945, the Arapahoe Basin was opened, beginning the skitourism industry, which to this day is a multi- billion dollar industry. In the 1940’s, the federal defence programme began the acquisition of large land tracks in along the Front Range. The Cheyenne Mountain Air Station, burrowed into the Rockies just over Colorado Springs, is a windowless steel city. The site is the most vital national defence resource for both Canada and the US; it is the nuclear bomb shelter for the US President and the place from which the first alarm of nuclear attack against North America would be sounded. In addition to military, numerous manufacturing plants have concurrently contributed to the vast consumption of territory and economically replaced the losses of agriculture and mining.

Today, Colorado is third in the nation in terms of economic diversity (after California and Illinois).

At the threshold of the millennium, Colorado is geographically a strategic hub. The bewildering micro- electronic age and global information economy place Colorado as a communications and transport cross- roads. From Denver, by air, any major US city is within four hours. Due to time zones, the Front Range businessman can make a 9:00 AM local time call to Paris (5:00 PM) and a 5:00 PM call to Tokyo (9:00 AM). An aggressive economic development program, championed by the state’s Governor, Roy Romer, has offered irresistible incentives to transnational corporations as well as national headquarters.

A highly educated work force (Colorado has the highest percentage of college graduates in the US) has been lured to an entrepreneurial haven by an array of aerospace and defence technology, computer (IBM, Helwett Packard, Apple), telecommunication, biotechnology, geography information systems and global positioning systems firms.

Over the past decade, the state has prospered as one of the most robust economies in the nation, creating thousands of new jobs and inevitable, unplanned sporadic growth.

FIN DE SIECLE BONANZA

Since 1940, the Denver Metropolitan area had doubled in population every 20 years, with over 2 million inhabitants at present. From slightly over 3.7 million in mid-1995 Colorado’s numbers will swell to 4 million by the year 2000 and more than 5 million before 2025. 3

Colorado’s growth is the fastest in the Rocky Mountain West. As population increases, there is an exponential rise in highway congestion, loss of open space, water pollution, ground water overdraft and loss of wild lands.

Along the Front Range, more than 35,000 people have come since 1990; nearly 1 million more are expected by 2020. Highlands Ranch, a congested agglomeration of single-family residences, located 12 miles south of Denver in the nation’s fastest growing county (Douglas County), is carved from 22,000 acres of ranchland by the Mission Viejo Company, a subsidiary of Philip Morris. Although 7,000 acres of the subdivision are reserved for wildlife habitat, the gesture provides dubious justification for the scars of the commodification of the landscape. The development is forecasted to top out at 90,000 people early in the next century; it currently stores 36,000.

SPRAWL AS POLICY

Sprawl is heavily subsidized from the US federal government. Since World War II the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has insured home mortgages and the Veterans Administration (VA) has provided government guaranteed low down-payment home and mortgage loans to buyers. There also exist substantial federal income tax benefits for suburban homeowners, through deductions of interest on home mortgage payments and cost of property taxes.

The state of Colorado has the lowest average tax burden in the nation. Paralleling these suburbanization incentives has been a lack of financing for inner- city home ownership; the majority of urbanites remain renters.

The out-migration of urban manufacturing plants and national and regional headquarters, again encouraged through tax relief, major capital investments (from tax dollars) in the interstate highway system and the ‘break even’ or privately owned public transport system has exacerbated the diffusion of the city into the territory. Advances in transportation, communication and industrial technology, interacting with changing structure of national and global economy have transformed the Front Range from centres of material goods production to centres of information exchange, finance and administration. Manufacturing and warehousing is continually relocated. The NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome is firmly rooted in the selfish minds of the new suburbanites.

Open space is in danger of becoming a privilege in Front Range country. According to state figures, Colorado is losing 90,000 acres of rural land a year to subdivisions, malls and other developments.

Voters in several Front Range countries and municipalities have agreed to increase the sales tax to buy land and set it aside. Presently, throughout Colorado there are 34 land trusts, which manage tens of thousands of acres set aside through bequests, donations and a type of preservation known as conservation easement. In 1992, the Great Outdoors (GO) Colorado program was established, providing a new vehicle for land space acquisition, through Lottery profits. The restructuring processes of post- industrial wastelands is also slated to be set aside as public open space. ‘If you build it, they will come’. 4

The ‘leapfrog’ subdivision developments from urban fringe to countryside, consume vast tracts of open space not only for the sprawl but also for the networks of infrastructure necessary for its link to urban nodes. The erosion of interstitial spaces that once separated free-standing communities and metro centres which now appear as strip corridors, spines for retail development and business parks.

In 1973, Interstate 70 pierced the Front Range crest with the Eisenhower/Johnson tunnel. By 1996 more than 24,000 vehicles per day transited the tunnel, four times as many as in 1973. The Sunday afternoon traffic clog of suburbanites returning to home sweet home after a day in the mountains is forcing state officials to consider widening I-70 at the tunnel and adding another tunnel bore. PeÒa Boulevard, a direct route to the new 4.3 billion dollar Denver International Airport, awaits links with the new ring road being constructed around Denver. The ground has been marked, the seeds of big-box retail/office intruders have been planted.

Interstates 70, 25 and 76 congeal at Denver’s notorious highway super-spaghetti. Interstate 80 crosses the northern portion of the Front Range. Despite the energy crisis of the 1970s, the de-regulation of the 1980s and the still-booming air-freight and package-delivery industry, the United States still moves by truck. Most of the nation’s largest freight haulers have hubs along the Front Range corridor.

Today, 73 percent of Coloradans live in areas which violate health-based air quality standards. The infamous ‘brown cloud’ looms above Front Range urban areas and Coloradans spend $ 224 million annually on health care costs resulting from high levels of particulate air pollution. November to March is officially the winter high pollution season and Clean Air Colorado frequently announces ‘red’ pollution days, which places a ban on wood burning (which accounts for up to 25% of the brown cloud).

WATER EQUALS WEALTH

Historically, water has represented wealth in Colorado. The Front Range receives only 35 centimetres of rain per year. The state’s constitution protects the right to divert water. Water rights are property that can be bought, sold or inherited and senior holders get priority.

Many communities divert the flow of Western Slope rivers via giant tunnels bored through the Front Range from west to east, including one of the world’s longest water tunnels (37 kilometre long, 3 metre wide conduit) that connects a reservoir at Dillion with the South Platte River. The Denver Water Department, the largest of the Front Range water districts gets nearly half of its water budget from the Western Slope of the Rockies. Nor should we forget the ground water. The four-layer, bowl-shaped aquifer of ancient, rockbound water holds about the same volume as Lake Erie. State law permits using 1% of the aquifer’s water annually theoretically depleting the aquifer within a hundred years.

(ECO)LOGICAL AWARENESS?

The Front Range’s past failings to consider the environmental impact of economically driven land exploitation is proving to be an expensive lesson. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal (1942), a 17,000 acre (27- square-mile) site 15 kilometres north of Denver, was established as a chemical weapons manufacturing site, producing mustard gas, white phosphorous and napalm. From 1952-1982, the site was home of Shell Chemical (now Shell Oil), manufacturing deadly herbicides and pesticides.

The site is now designated as a National Wildlife Refuge. It also boasts the most polluted square mile on the planet. 25 kilometres northwest of Denver are 6,500 acres (25 square kilometres) of the Rocky Mountain Flats, whose historic mission was to produce plutonium, uranium and stainless steel components for nuclear weapons under the US Atomic Energy Commission. The site is currently listed as a US Government top priority of Individual Hazardous Substance Sites. Once cleaned-up, the site will remain an open space; a ghastly reminder of the devastating effects of an ill-conceived and permanent destruction of ecology.

AN INEVITABLE REALITY?

The unintentional yet inevitable social consequences of leap-frog, sprawl development are catastrophic to the romantic vision of the pristine Western frontier. The Front Range can no longer afford the bourgeois luxury of sprawl. The feasibility and effectiveness of the decentralized and monofunctional metropolis has backfired. No longer an engine of growth, sprawl has proliferated a steady and irrecoverable degradation of the quality of life. Land, water and clean air are finite qualities. Pursuit of progress therefore demands re-formulation of the man-made territory in the light of historical and contemporary experience.

The deleterious flee from urban centers to the fringe and countryside destroys that which is desired and needs to be reconsidered.

American society manifests itself through the market mechanism of capitalism. Since the physical formulation of the built environment is anchored in cultural reality, government fiscal policies implemented by the representatives of the people, are the only possibility of changing the course of development of the Front Range. To this end, the State of Colorado has passed a referendum for ‘smart growth,’ whose main drive is to establish an urban growth boundary. Perhaps, this will impact growth patterns, but reversing the exodus from city to suburb is a pipe-dream.

If Coloradians continue to idealize themselves as ruggedindividualists and can not compromise their immediate values for Colorado’s long-term interests, the Front Range will continue to be victimized by self-inflicted dilemmas.

NOTES

1. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge (Mass.)/ London (The MIT Press), 1992, p. 167.

2. Richard Moe, ‘Growing Wiser: Finding Alternatives to Sprawl’, Design Quarterly 164 (Spring 1995), p. 4.

3. All of the statistics for this article were taken from the Colorado Environmental Handbook – The State of Colorado; Colorado Environmental Coalition, 1996.

4. From the novel ‘Shoeless Joe’ by Ray Kinsella and subsequent Hollywood-movie adaptation, ‘Field of Dreams.’