“To Live among the Trees”: Sustainability, Sprawl, and Scale in The Woodlands, Texas

The Woodlands, Texas, has long been considered an example of early sustainable urban design. Developed by oil and gas entrepreneur George Mitchell as a Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD)-sponsored New Town, The Woodlands has also been successful in the marketplace. Despite these efforts toward creating a sustainable community and encouraging cleaner economic growth in Houston, and being much more progressive than earlier master planned communities, in this paper I argue that The Woodlands actually hindered sustainability and increased inequity in Houston and elsewhere. This becomes apparent when we employ a scalar perspective rather than looking solely at the internal design features of the development. I argue that employing this perspective allows for an assessment of The Woodlands that better demonstrates its connections to the sprawling landscape of Houston, to the New Towns program from which it evolved, to economic decentralization, and to the global extractive industries that helped to fund it.