Sprawl

Dense and Dispersed Urban Territory

But in many ways, the existence of the dense and dispersed city and urban territory is not a new thing. It has been developing for a number of years, but the development has intensified dramatically during the last couple of decades. A relatively small number of people now live in the old and denser parts of the cities, the rest (the majority) in a dispersed urban territory, bound together by infrastructure and not by continuity of urban form. The new thing is perhaps the growing [Page 767]awareness that it is happening and a tendency by some to regard it in a more relaxed manner.

In some of the recent research the development of sprawl is traced in different periods throughout history and especially in the twentieth century. From the early days of sprawl through the postwar boom years to the sprawl condition of today, we have been witnessing often controversial causes of sprawl, different antisprawl campaigns initiated, and different remedies brought into play to counteract the development. It is convincingly argued and explained why most of these campaigns and remedies do not work.

A useful tool for visualizing the effects of sprawl on the urban development is the density gradient. Residential or employment density of an urban area is recorded along the vertical axis as population per square mile or kilometer, while distance from the city center in miles or kilometers is marked on the horizontal axis. If we take for instance London 1801 as a starting point, we get a very steep graph falling from the left to the right indicating a rather dense city center, quickly transforming to a distinct periphery only a few miles away from the center. Over the years London, as well as most other cities, has lost population in the center and has grown enormously in the periphery, producing a much flatter graph. This density gradient tends to become flatter for all urban areas, unless, of course, we are dealing with urban territories with a natural boundary (e.g., Hong Kong). Even Los Angeles is denser than New York if the urban territory is taken as a whole. Paris is like London: At least three-fourths of the population of the 10 million that live in the urban territory of Paris in the region Île-de-France, live outside the beltway (le périphérique). A job count confirms the tendency. During the 1990s the city of Paris lost 200,000 jobs, whereas the outer suburban area gained 160,000 jobs. By the end of the twentieth century it was obvious that a generalized urban sprawl had rendered the old distinctions between urban and rural obsolete in many areas of the world and created a diffuse mode of life founded on mobility and the single-family house.

...