Summary
Contents
The SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding.
Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension.
Key Concepts in Urban Studies:
Clearly and concisely explains the basic ideas in the interdisciplinary field of urban studies; Offers concise discussions of concepts ranging from community, neighbourhood, and the city to globalization, the New Urbanism, feminine space, and urban problems; Constitutes a re-examination of the key ideas in the field; Is illustrated throughout with international examples; Provides an essential reference guide for all students and teachers across the urban disciplines within sociology, political science, planning and geography.
Sprawl
Sprawl
Ever since suburbanization became a mass phenomenon in the 1950s, urbanists have lamented the pattern of sprawl characteristic of that growth in places like the US and Canada. Sprawl is usually defined as ‘haphazard growth’ of relative low density over an extended region, with residential units dominated by single family homes. It implies a lack of planning and often results in the duplication of public services, such as policing, fire fighting and elementary education. This condition is curious because local administrations invariably possess planning staffs that engage in drafting comprehensive schemes for the direction of growth. In at least one study, this contradiction was explained as a social problem because of the way both local politicians and developers circumvent guidelines with regional sprawl as the result (Gottdiener, 1977). Sprawl is planned because it is, in part, ...
