Sprawl's Shepherd: The Rural County

On the far side of World War II, America commenced a revolution in land use. Between 1945 and 1960, something in the order of ten million single-family homes were constructed in suburban subdivisions on land at the urban fringe and in rural areas that was unincorporated prior to, if not after, its development. If counties had exercised stronger land use control over these areas, might our development patterns have turned out differently? What do we know of land use planning by counties, and what role did that legal development play in twentieth-century urban sprawl?