From the Skyscraper Page forum I came across some great photos from a series called “Sprawlfest”. It shows various forms of the disease as it is manifested across the USA.
This aerial image of a Minneapolis area housing estate embodies everything awful about ignorant development.
There are wide feeder roads to bring traffic into the area. Then there are smaller circular cul-de-sacs around which are built straight lined houses with garage door fronts. No attempt is made to curve the facade or shape of the homes in congruence with the shape of the street.
I don’t see any sidewalks, or common park areas, or street trees, to unify the community. The backyards of the homes face the speeding wide ribbon of road. There isn’t any commercial district to walk into.
This is a plan full of roads and full of residential buildings. It unfortunately is endemic in America, and it contributes to both social and environmental degradation.
Where is there any evidence of architectural or urban planning oversight of this project? Why do we look at this photo and instantly know that it part of the USA and nowhere else? What are England, Brazil, Taiwan and Mexico constructing more civilized places than America?
Here in Van Nuys 
Test.
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You would be surprised at how many of these features are actually mandated by regulatory authorities. The lack of a walking-distance commercial district is a result of single-use zoning and minimum parking requirements: 7/11 or CVS would love to put a store on a corner lot in the middle of one of these subdivisions, but there’s no way in hell that they’d be allowed to. The lack of through streets and the absence of anything fronting on the arterial road accords with the dictates of traffic engineers whose sole objective is to maximize traffic throughput. The lack of trees, OK, that’s a developer-driven thing, but there actually weren’t very many trees in Hancock Park or South Pasadena when those places were laid out, either; individual homeowners made their own landscaping decisions.
In regards to your last paragraph, you’re wrong. You can see subdivisions like this in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, and other countries where land is cheap and automobile usage is high. There are even developments like this in China and Indonesia, albeit at far higher densities.
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