Moving to Corn Fields

A reader on urban sprawl and
the regional future of Northeast Ohio

Moving to Corn Fields is EcoCity Cleveland's award-winning reader on urban sprawl and the regional future of Northeast Ohio. This 64-page special publication collects the best articles EcoCity Cleveland published in 1993, 1994 and 1995 on urban sprawl and outmigration in the Greater Cleveland area. It's a great overview of the land use challenges facing our region.

We have distributed 5,000 copies of Moving to Corn Fields to elected officials and interested citizens in Northeast Ohio. The publication has informed the land use debates in the region by helping people:

• Develop a regional consciousness that can foster greater identification with the region and a willingness to act for the long-term future of the entire region.
• Understand the costs of urban sprawl so that we know the impacts of current development patterns and can identify who wins and loses.
• Keep score by building the capacity to track the decisions that promote sprawling development patterns.
• Create inspirational alternatives that show how better, more environmentally and economically sustainable development patterns are possible.
• Organize for political change with winning coalitions that can promote more compact development, livable cities and preservation of Northeast Ohio's farmland and its agricultural economy.

Production of Moving to Corn Fields was supported by grants from the George Gund Foundation.

To read the publication in Web format, see the table of contents. Or see the original printed version (minus some graphics), downloard a PDF file (large 3.3 MB file size).

Moving to Corn Fields contents

New subdivisions in Lorain County.

I went back to Ohio,
but my pretty countryside
had been paved
down the middle
by a government
that had no pride.
The farms of Ohio
had been replaced by shopping malls.
And Muzak filled the air
from Seneca
to Cuyahoga Falls.
— "My City was Gone"
from The Pretenders'
Learning to Crawl album