One is the country's sixth largest city, with a 45 percent increase in population between 1993 and 2003. The other, once the country's fifth largest city, lost half its population and 40 percent of its jobs between 1960 and 2000.

But they have more in common than you might think. Today, Phoenix and Cleveland are flip sides of the same coin, and the coin of the realm is sprawl -- that out-of-control, peculiarly American affliction that swallows up desert and farmland alike like a flesh-eating bacteria.

Phoenix has sprawl and growth. Cleveland, like the Pittsburgh region, just has sprawl. Neither is good, and two documentaries airing tomorrow afternoon on WQED do a fine job of telling and showing you why -- and what both towns are doing to try to reverse the urban decline sprawl leaves in its wake.

Produced by Northern Light Productions for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, these hourlong docs diagnose, but they don't preach. Using vintage films, aerial photography and interviews with planners, architects, academics, politicians and homeowners, they tell their stories in a riveting and convincing way.

The ability to dam and move water made possible a desert city that's larger than Paris, Rome, San Francisco and Manhattan -- combined. A low-level flight over Phoenix is worth 1,000 ground shots, revealing a mind-numbingly monotonous landscape of soulless fake-stucco houses. With 3,300 new homes popping up every month, the Sonoran Desert, the second most diverse ecosystem on Earth (after the rainforest), is being lost at the rate of 1 acre per hour.

Meanwhile, the old urban core is suffering. Solutions? In South Phoenix, citizens sought help from the city, which created the Dream Street program, offering construction incentives and low-interest mortgages to create new homes on some of the neighborhood's 150 vacant lots.

Phoenix also voted to increase its sales tax to purchase conservation lands within the inevitable new developments: A million more people will move there in the next decade.

In Cleveland, one of the nation's poorest cities, there are 120 acres of parking lots downtown where buildings had been. But in the Fairfax neighborhood, where 80 percent of the residents have left since the 1950s, the city acquired vacant lots, placed them in a "land bank" and sold them for $100 each to homebuilders, bringing 250 new housing units to the neighborhood.

In the Hough neighborhood, in another pilot project called CitiRAMA, the city gave land to 12 homebuilders who erected a dozen custom-built, suburban-style homes; buyers got a 15-year-tax abatement.

Revivals in other neighborhoods, like the Arena District and Tremont, are bringing back empty nesters and young adults who can't wait to flee their suburbs. Middle-class families are a harder sell; they're opting for new communities like Crocker Park, where they can have Main Street amenities without the problems of the city.

"We may no longer have to move to the city to enjoy urban living," the narrator notes.

There are six new malls and more than 10,000 new stores in Cleveland's suburbs, but suburbs in its inner ring, like Euclid, are suffering: most of the 100 stores in its mall have closed.

"In 50 years we will have brought down another 20 suburbs in this county," predicts Cleveland State University adjunct professor Thomas Bier, a housing specialist who has studied inner-ring suburbs.

The city's schools are hurting, too, struggling with multimillion dollar deficits. And since 1990, more than 1,000 school-age children in Cleveland have died from urban violence.

"Cleveland has yet to stem its general decline," the program concludes. "It's not alone."

"Phoenix: The Urban Desert" and "Cleveland: Confronting Decline in an American City" are part of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's "Making Sense of Place" film series.