Urban sprawl or suburban sprawl, as it is also commonly known as, is a combination of low density, auto oriented, neighborhoods and communities. These cities, communities and townships can each be described as individual systems that work together to create an ever larger system, the metropolis. And though each community or township can be broken down into even smaller system components consisting of individual neighborhoods, schools, families, and people, during this essay I will focus on sustainability issues urban sprawl at the macro level. Why it is urban sprawl a sustainability challenge? Using the criteria needed to determine if a problem is a sustainability problem, the following is true of urban sprawl: 1) The problem is urgent. 2) The problem significantly harmful over the long term. 3) The problem spreads across different sectors and across different spatial levels. 4) Underlying causes of the problem manifold and can be characterized by long and indirect cause and effect chains. 5) The problem is controversially discussed or willfully obscured. 6) There is a demonstrable lack of intervention capability to develop and implement a solution that mitigates or resolves the identified problem. Modern communities are developed using community planning tactics that utilize single use, low density zoning that promotes the outward expansion of city limits into undeveloped land surrounding a city’s borders. Like the expansion of American waistlines, bloated budgets, and supersized value meals, urban sprawl is yet another example of things gone wrong with our society. Urban sprawl not only contributes to many local and global environmental issues, it also has negative impacts on the health of city residents, and contributes to the degradation of urban centers by decreasing the racial and economic divisiveness of communities as a whole. Urban Sprawl, where is it? And where did it start? Well for starters, if you live in a large city west of the Mississippi, or in a city that has seen rapid population growth over the past sixty years, then you probably only need to open your front door and walk outside to find it. The Los Angeles, and Phoenix Metropolitan areas (the latter being the center of this case study), are sound examples of urban sprawl. Visit one of these megalopolises, and you will find Communities truly built in celebration of the automobile. Hundreds of miles of shimmering ten lane freeways stretching further than the eye can see, joining communities filled with seemingly identical “cookie cutter” strip malls, gas stations, and "McMansions" to one another. In these cities you will find thousands of automobiles traveling daily on city boulevards that skirt passengers in gas guzzling SUVs around decaying urban centers; past tire salons, big box stores, and automobile dealerships, all while in the air conditioned comfort of their vehicles. Urban sprawl could be viewed as a byproduct of American westward expansion during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A true example of American exceptionalism, but can we as Americans truly call urban sprawl our own? The answer is surprisingly no. Urban sprawl has been a part of municipalities for as long as they have existed. The dynamic of opulent inner city inhabitants leaving the inner parts of the city for the lower density suburbs of the town, can be traced back to Roman antiquity (Bruegmann, 2005). Here in these Villa suburbana (Haag), where wealthy people, who had the means to purchase and sustain working farms bought from the poor, or purchased land to build villas, could escape the overcrowding, noise, and crime that have characterized the epicenter of large cities since the dawn of time (Bruegmann, 2005). We in the modern world, have just made urban sprawl bigger, and its overall impacts more detrimental to the world we live in. So if urban sprawl can be traced back through most of civilized human existence, why is it deemed so bad today? Well, that answer can become complex, but the short answer is not that we are creating it, but how and what, we are using to create it. During the reign of the Roman Empire, and continuing through the beginning of the the industrial revolution, urban sprawl could usually only consume the resources located relatively close to the community. For example, buildings were constructed of primarily stone and wood; and because of limited transportation methods, stone and wood could only be mined or harvested, then transported a certain distance from cities. Lack of refrigeration also meant that food could only be farmed and brought to market short distances from the city before going rancid. Therefore it could be said that pre-industrial urban sprawl had a self-limiting, self-checking, system in pl