An ISU professor is offering advice on preserving small towns and containing urban sprawl to policy planners in Iowa and elsewhere.

Gary Mattson, associate professor in community and regional planning, explores management of urban development in his new book, “Small Towns, Sprawl and the Politics of Policy Choices — The Florida Experience.”

“Sprawl is not simply a pattern of development, but the lack of planning for the development,” Mattson said.

Mattson said he believes development that is haphazard is not development at all.

Large expanses of low-density residential and commercial development on the rural-urban fringe is where sprawl can be experienced at its worst, Mattson said. He blames sprawl on people no longer wanting to live in large cities.

The desire for safe and less crowded neighborhoods, picket fences and golf courses is motivating more and more Americans to drive out to the suburbs, which puts an incredible amount of pressure for housing choices, job opportunities and infrastructure on these newly suburbanized lands, Mattson said.

This is where sprawls are born to accommodate needs of office and retail parks and high-end income housing, he said.

“Successful suburbs and small towns require healthy, viable town centers,” Mattson said.

In his book, Mattson writes that for many small towns, their main streets, a key element of local social participation, have become threatened. Small pedestrian styled communities are discouraged due to the abundance of automobiles.

“The more people utilize a town center, the more interesting and significant a place it is,” Mattson writes. “The bottom line for town center vitality is the number of people and pedestrian traffic it can attract.”

In his book, Mattson proposes a bottom-up model for planning development of small towns and keeping sprawls and a “loss of sense of place” at bay.

He suggests planners shy away from short term goals of merely increasing the local tax base, expanding job pools and protecting infrastructure.

Mattson said long term goals are needed and proposes a “Smart Growth” strategy to think regionally, but act locally. He proposes some suggestions for local governing bodies and urges proactive planning on their part to maintain the balance between development and the local environment.

All across America, sprawl has taken away the best of what makes small towns great communities, Mattson said.

Using Florida as an example, Mattson points out how top-down, short-term, solely profit oriented planning does not work.

“Although everyone touted the Florida model 30 years back, its clearly not working,” Mattson said.

For some of his book, Mattson drew on personal experiences. Mattson grew up in a small town of 8,000 in upstate New York. His town’s Main Street “is now a mere shadow of what it used to be,” he said.

Mattson said one reason he moved to Iowa is because it has not yet been completely overrun by sprawl. Iowa still has a chance to benefit from lessons learned elsewhere, he said.