Urban Sprawl

The term urban sprawl should be understood in the context of a deep-seated and ongoing conflict over differing visions of and priorities for the development of urban regions, between those who see contemporary suburban land development patterns as a good thing and those who see them as a major social and environmental problem. The meaning and image of urban sprawl are contested and are thus continually evolving, but most discussions of urban sprawl identify a number of common characteristics, including low-density residential development on the urban fringe, segregated land uses that give rise to long-distance travel and dependence on automobiles for mobility, and leapfrogging of development over undeveloped areas.

Although critiques of urban sprawl have become increasingly prominent during the past three decades, concern about patterns of urban expansion was a major issue for planning advocates in Western Europe and North America in the early 20th century. Their argument was that planned suburban growth offered a chance to prevent the problems of overcrowding, disease, pollution, and congestion that plagued 19th-century industrial cities and that unplanned urbanization would merely produce more of the same. A major goal of the early planners was therefore to be able to regulate and plan for development on the fringe, to ensure that housing areas were separated from industry; road patterns were well designed; water, sewer, and public transit facilities were built; and parks and natural areas set aside. Although most developed countries had enacted some elements of city planning legislation before World War II, powers were limited, and most development continued to be unplanned.

After the war, increased city-planning powers, rapid economic growth, and a spurt in house building led to the development of expansive new suburban areas with single-family, detached homes. Zoning regulations designed to avoid the problem of mixed housing and industrial areas encouraged the creation of purely residential developments, while the mobility offered by widespread automobile use meant that land was cheap [Page 2988]and housing could be built for all classes at relatively low densities. Early in this postwar residential boom, the term urban sprawl was coined to describe the new patterns of suburban residential development. Early critiques were in part aesthetic, as observers reacted with shock to the enormous scale of the transformation of rural landscapes into homogeneous tracts of single-family homes that were widely seen as ugly.

Aerial view of San Jose, California. The intersection of Interstate 280 and California State Route 87 (Guadalupe Parkway) is visible at the bottom of the photograph.

Source: Robert Campbell/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library.

Over time, however, as the scale of suburbanization accelerated, with ever-larger and more dispersed patterns of development during the past 50 years, the critiques of urban sprawl became more sophisticated and were supported by a growing range of actors. These include many municipal governments and planners, who must deal with the high infrastructure costs of low-density and leapfrog development patterns that leave tracts of land undeveloped; environmentalists, who show that sprawl consumes far more land than necessary and threatens wildlife because scattered development leads to habitat fragmentation; transport planners, who see low-density, segregated land uses as the major cause of traffic congestion even with high levels of investment in roads, because virtually every trip must be made by car; health advocates, who argue that automobile-dependent suburbs contribute to ill health and obesity by making walking and bicycling difficult; those concerned with social equity, who see the high levels of racial and economic segregation of American society as in large part a product of the white flight to affluent suburbs, which left the poor and racialized minorities to reside in the crumbling inner cities; and those concerned with global warming and environmental sustainability, who see automobile-dependent suburbs as unnecessarily wasteful of fossil fuels.

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