Urban Sprawl

The term urban sprawl is is used widely and inconsistently and is usually associated with negative connotations of urban expansion. The definition means, variously, unplanned loss of agricultural and other land to sub(urbanization) where there is minimal or no coordination of service and infrastructure provision, through to planned urban expansion that provides appropriate services and infrastructure but converts land to urban uses. The term could be more accurately expressed as suburban sprawl. As Richard Peiser notes, the term sprawl is used to mean different things, including “the gluttonous use of land, uninterrupted monotonous development, leapfrog discontinuous development and inefficient use of land.” In terms of sustainability, each of these problems labeled sprawl invokes different solutions in order to make cities more sustainable.