William Whyte, open space, and environmental activism

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a variety of Americans began to protest the loss of open space to suburban sprawl. The critics of sprawl - William Whyte, most notably - argued that open space had great aesthetic, social, and ecological value. To preserve open space, activists lobbied for the acquisition of public land and touted land-saving forms of development. Although both efforts brought important successes, both proved inadequate. Even so, the open-space debate had enduring consequences: It shaped later efforts to force builders to meet new environmental obligations, and it played a key role in the evolution of the environmental movement.