Libraries: the Anti-Sprawl

Driving south recently on Maryland’s Route 4, the last spoke of Washington D.C.’s wheel of avenues to yield to sprawl, we spotted an enormous brick building with an aeronautically bowed roof and modernist glass front: certainly the most interesting new structure amid the still sprouting strip malls and subdivisions. “What’s that? Second WalMart?.” No, came the answer, the new library. In rapidly suburbanizing places like Calvert County, libraries are being discovered as an antidote to sprawl, bringing neighbors together not only to read but lounge online and gather socially, even run into their teenagers. What’s most remarkable about the phenomenon is that politicians are willing to horsetrade to get the funds for these increasingly hi-tech, big ticket items inserted into the budget. An article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains why: “Libraries in sprawling suburban areas have become community centers and, for politicians, an important place to meet with constituents.” As a result, the piece says, “deluxe new libraries are a popular form of political currency at the state Capitol.”