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"It took government diktat to create sprawl. At no time before the widespread adoption of zoning, fire, and highway codes was this a method used for constructing the human habitat in our free enterprise system."

This is an argument I haven't heard much before. Most of the smart-growthers in the press and at the ULI argue that sprawl results from the opposite - lack of planning and free choice, the latter relating to the growth of automobile use in the early middle of the century.

I believe the social critic E. Michael Jones made a similar argument to yours in a recent book, though I've only read reviews. Basically, he seems to think that sprawl was the result of Protestant progressive plans to break up the ethnic and Catholic enclaves in the city.

That's a difficult argument to make in Houston, where zoning has never been implemented on a public level (excluding private contract deed restrictions, etc).
I'd be interested in seeing other research you might be able to point to in support of your assertion. Jones' tome is rather long and polemical, I'd like to see some hard research.

Its more than just zoning codes that go into sprawl. There are also the highway design manuals, fire codes, and similar items. It is actually illegal to build a traditional town because it violates the highway design manual and doesn't allow fire/rescue vehicles to barrel around corners at full speed.

And as you note, there are social factors weighing heavily in favor of breaking up old neighborhoods for political reasons. This is still happening in Philadelphia, and it has been proceeding with a vengence since Clinton's accession to office in 1993 with the housing policies dictated by Section 8 starting under his administration - namely flooding stable Republican/Catholic/Conservative Protestant neighborhoods with criminals and undesirables through this program.

I don't buy the liberal arguement that the cure for sprawl is more planning. The cure for sprawl is an end to planning and letting people and developers use their own land however they wish. Most Americans I think, for example, would not build a neighborhood and then exclude Churches from being built as part of it. Zoning codes do. So does giving other people vetos over the plans of developers and homeowners.

The biggest single problem though, is that instead of growth through the founding of more towns and villages within the countryside, we see growth by the elimination of the countryside. Who ever has heard of a real new town being developed recently (not just some amorphous suburb, but a real town)? I cannot figure out why this is, but there has to be something that has forced such a drastic change in the human environment.