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Urban sprawl (also: suburban sprawl), a term with pejorative implication, refers to the rapid and expansive growth of a greater metropolitan area, traditionally suburbs (or exurbs) over a large area. "Urban sprawl" may be a loaded term and it can have negative connotations. The phrase has been used by some critics to describe almost any urban growth, but this usage is misleading. Characteristics Sprawl is characterized by several land use patterns which usually occur in unison: Single-use zoning Commercial, residential, and industrial areas are separated from one another. Large tracts of land are devoted to the same type of development. Zoning areas are segregated from one another by roads, green space, or other barriers. As a result, the places where people live, work, shop, and recreate are necessarily far apart from one another, usually so far apart that walking is not practical, so activities all require a car. Low-density land use Sprawl consumes much more land than traditional urban developments because new developments are of low density. The exact definition of "low density" is arguable, but a common example is that of single family homes, as opposed to apartments. Buildings usually have fewer stories and are spaced further apart, separated by lawns, landscaping, roads or parking lots. Lot sizes are larger, and because more automobiles are used much more land is designated for parking. The impact of low density development in many communities is that developed or "urbanized" land is increasing at a faster rate than the population. In some places, a population increase of one or two percent can produce an increase in developed land of as much as thirty percent. Another kind of low-density development is sometimes called leap-frog development. This term refers to the relationship, or lack thereof, between one subdivision and the next. Such developments are typically separated by large tracts of undeveloped land, resulting in an average density far lower even than the low density described in the previous paragraph. This is a 20th and 21st century phenomenon generated by the current custom of requiring a developer to provide subdivision infrastructure as a condition of development. Usually, the developer is required to set aside a certain percentage of the developed land for public use, including roads, parks and schools. In the past, when a local government built all the streets in a given location, the town could expand without interruption and with a coherent circulation system, because it had condemnation power. Private developers generally do not have such power (although they can sometimes find local governments willing to help), and often choose to develop on the tracts that happen to be for sale at the time they want to build, rather than pay extra or wait for a more appropriate location. The cheaper the land, the higher the profit margin. Car dependent communities Areas of urban sprawl are also characterized as being extremely dependent on automobiles for transportation. Most activities, such as shopping, commuting to work, concerts, etc. require the use of a car as a result of both the area's isolation from the city and the isolation the area's residential zones have from its industrial and commercial zones. Walking and other methods of transit are not practical; therefore, many of these areas have few or no sidewalks. Scale of development Development in these areas tends to be on a larger scale than that of older established areas. This typically involves larger houses, wider roads and larger stores with expansive parking lots. Low density sprawl also requires large public investments in infrastructure, and some believe that sprawl-type growth is not economically sustainable. Homogeneity in design Because developments are built as large-scale tract projects or massive office parks, neighboring buildings tend to resemble one another. Built from similar design principles, sprawled cities also lack diversity, sometimes creating a sense of uniform design. Some examples In examples of this phenomenon, such as Los Angeles, California, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Phoenix, Arizona, the Washington, DC metro area, and Atlanta, Georgia, new development is often low-density, where the metropolis grows outward instead of 'upward' as with higher densities. A number of metropolitan areas may lay claim to the title "most sprawling urban area." The New York City urbanized area covers more land area than any other, at approximately 8,684 square kilometers (3,353 sq miles). Arguably, the lowest density large urbanized area (over 1,000,000) in the world is Atlanta, which covers 5,084 square kilometers (1,963 sq miles), with a population of 5,249,121 for a density of 1,032 people per square kilometer (2,674 people per square mile). This is approximately one-third the density of the New York urbanized area. Other examples of low density metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Australia with 3,689,700 people over 7,694 km², the city spans nearly 90Km from east to west and has a population density of 479.6/km². Helsinki in Finland, which has only 1,232,595 people spread over 2,970.6 km² area, resulting in a population density of just 415.0/km². At the opposite end of the spectrum, the world's most dense major urbanized area is Hong Kong, with about 3,500,000 people in 70 square kilometers (27 sq miles), for a population density of 48,571 per square kilometer (128,000 per sq mile). This is higher than the density of the Manhattan borough of New York City (which has about 1,500,000 people in 22 square miles). Examples in the United States According to the National Resources Inventory (NRI), about 8,900 square kilometers (2.2 million acres) of land was developed between 1992 and 2002. Presently, the NRI classifies approximately 100,000 more square kilometers (40,000 sq miles) (an area approximately the size of Kentucky) as developed as the Census Bureau classifies as urban. The difference in the NRI classification is that it includes rural development, which by definition cannot be considered to be "urban" sprawl. Currently, according to the 2000 Census, approximately 2.6 percent of the US land area is urban. Approximately 0.8 percent of the nation's land is in the 37 urbanized areas with more than 1,000,000 population. Nonetheless, some urban areas have expanded geographically even while losing population. For example, between 1970 to 2000, the population of the Detroit, Michigan urban area declined 2% while its land area increased 45%. Similar situations occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Buffalo, New York and Rochester, New York. But it was not just US urbanized areas that lost population and sprawled substantially. According to data in "Cities and Automobile Dependence" by Kenworthy and Laube (1999), urbanized area population losses occurred while there was an expansion of sprawl between 1970 and 1990 in Brussels, Belgium; Copenhagen, Denmark; Frankfurt, Germany; Hamburg, Germany; Munich, Germany and Zurich, Switzerland. At the same time, the urban cores of these and nearly all other major cities in the United States, Western Europe and Japan that did not annex new territory experienced the related phenomena of falling household size and "white flight", sustaining population losses High-Income World Central City Population Losses. This trend has slowed somewhat in recent years, as more people are have regained an interest in urban living. To combat sprawl, the state of Oregon enacted a law in 1973 limiting the area urban areas could occupy, through urban growth boundaries. As a result, Portland, the state's largest urban area, has become a leader in smart growth policies that seek to make urban areas more compact (they are called urban consolidation policies). After the creation of this boundary, the population density of the urbanized area increased somewhat (from 1,135 in 1970 to 1,290 per km² in 2000) USA Urbanized Areas 1950-1990 USA Urbanized Areas 2000. While the growth boundary has not been tight enough to vastly increase density, the consensus is that the growth boundaries have protected great amounts of wild areas and farm land around the metro area. Los Angelization
One view of urban sprawl Separation of land used for different purposes One property that many detractors consider characteristic of sprawl is the physical separation of space used for different activities: housing subdivisions, shopping centers, office parks, civic institutions, and roadways. (Duany Plater-Zyberk 5) Housing subdivisions Housing subdivisions are large tracts of land consisting entirely of newly-built residences. Duany and Plater-Zyberk claim that housing subdivisions “are sometimes called villages, towns, and neighborhoods by their developers, which is misleading since those terms denote places which are not exclusively residential and which provide an experiential richness not available in a housing tract.” Subdivisions often incorporate curved roads and cul-de-sacs, which some find inherently disorienting. Such subdivisions may offer only a few places to enter and exit the development, causing traffic to use high volume collector streets. All trips, no matter how short, must enter the collector road in a suburban system. (Duany Plater-Zyberk 5, 34) These types of subdivisions are less safe in case of robberies or fires, because fire, rescue, and police units have fewer points of entry and often have to navigate clogged collector roads to reach the scene. Critics complain that subdivisions and suburban homes are often identical in design, color, and materials. Existing trees and vegetation are often eradicated and replaced, making the streets look bare and empty. Shopping centers Shopping centers are locations consisting of retail space. In the US suburban context these vary from strip malls which refer to collections of buildings sharing a common parking lot, usually built on a high-capacity roadway with commercial functions (i.e. a "strip"). Similar developments in the UK are called Retail Parks. Strip malls/retail parks contain a wide variety of retail and non-retail functions that also cater to daily use (e.g. video rental, takeout food, laundry services, hairdresser). Strip malls consisting mostly of big box stores or category killers are sometimes called "power centers" (USA). These developments tend to be low-density; the buildings are single-story and there is ample space for parking and access for delivery vehicles. This character is reflected in the spacious landscaping of the parking lots and walkways and clear signage of the retail establishments. Some strip malls are undergoing a transformation into Lifestyle centers; entailing investments in common areas and facilities (plazas, cafes) and shifting tenancy from daily goods to recreational shopping. The presence of strip malls is often viewed as an indicator for sprawl, and there have been efforts to limit their proliferation via planning restrictions (Big Box Ordinance). European countries such as France, Belgium and Germany have implemented size restrictions for superstores in an effort to limit sprawl (Davies 1995). Another prominent form of retail development in areas characterized by "sprawl" is the shopping mall. Unlike the strip mall, this is usually comprised of a single building surrounded by a parking lot which contains multiple shops, usually "anchored" by one or more department stores (Gruen and Smith 1960). The function and size is also distinct from the strip mall. The focus is almost exclusively on recreational shopping rather than daily goods. Shopping malls also tend to serve a wider (regional) public and require higher-order infrastructure such as highway access and can have floorspaces in excess of a million square feet (ca. 100,000 m2). Currently, the largest shopping mall in the world is the West Edmonton Mall, while the largest in the United States is the Mall of America. Shopping malls are blamed for contributing to sprawl by encouraging car use and supplanting the need to visit downtown areas, since the shopping malls acts as a surrogate for the city center (Crawford 1992). Some downtowns have responded to this challenge by building shopping centers of their own (Frieden and Sagelyn 1989; consider also Toronto's Eaton Centre and Ottawa's Rideau Centre). Fast food chains are common in suburban areas. They are often built early in areas with low property values where the population is about to boom and where large traffic is predicted, and set a precedent for future development. Eric Schlosser, in his book Fast Food Nation, argues that fast food chains accelerate suburban sprawl and help set its tone with their expansive parking lots, flashy signs, and plastic architecture (65). Duany and Plater-Zyberk believe that this only reinforces a destructive pattern of growth in an endless quest to move away from the sprawl that only results in creating more of it (Duany Plater-Zyberk 26). Office parks Office parks are places set aside exclusively for companies to build work locations, usually offices. The contemporary office park was born from the modernist vision of skyscrapers surrounded by a utopian park-like environment to preserve open space, although many office parks today contain little greenspace and are accessible only by the automobile, which is also used to leave the office park for meals. By comparison, Duany and Plater-Zyberk believe that in traditional neighborhoods the nearness of the workplace to retail and restaurant space that provides cafes and convenience stores with daytime customers is an essential component to the successful balance of urban life. Furthermore, they state that the closeness of the workplace to homes also gives people the option of walking or riding a bicycle to work and that without this kind of interaction between the different components of life the urban pattern quickly falls apart. (Duany Plater-Zyberk 6, 28) Civic institutions The fourth component of sprawl named by some opponents is civic institutions. This is space zoned for public life, such as town halls, libraries, schools, churches and theaters. Some urban planners claim that in traditional neighborhoods these buildings were given places of importance in the community, accessible to everyone, and often creating the focal point of an entire city, perhaps at the end of a scenic boulevard, but that this scheme is radically different in suburban areas. They claim that schools and churches, for instance, are becoming more like shopping malls, located near the edges of communities and surrounded by parking lots. Greatly fewer children walk to school than did a generation ago, partly due to the increased average distance from home to school. Many school districts bus children in, resulting in a greater expense to the taxpayers. Some claim that this phenomenon also inflates class sizes, marginalizing the educations of students. (Duany Plater-Zyberk 6) Roadways The last component of sprawl listed by some detractors is roadways, which connect the above listed locations. Partly because many communities are now planned with the assumption that all their members own cars, the average suburban household generates 13 car trips per day. Some critics consider this property to be socially isolating and bad for the environment. Bibliography of works cited Arguments for and against By many measures, real estate development is taken as a measure of progress. When a city grows laterally, new homes are built, transport projects are undertaken, and property values often are higher in the new areas of the metropolitan area. In addition, many households in the United States, Canada, and Australia, especially middle and upper class families, have shown a preference for the suburban lifestyle. Reasons cited include a preference towards lower-density development (since it sometimes features lower ambient noise and increased privacy), better schools, and a generally slower lifestyle than the urban one. Crime rates are sometimes lower in the suburbs, although when car-related fatalities are included, it may still be more dangerous to live in the suburbs than in the city. Many also argue that this sort of living situation is an issue of personal choice and economic means. Recent studies have suggested that people living in areas dominated by sprawl are less healthy than their urban (inner-city) counterparts. The major reason cited for this observation is the tendency for those in suburbanized areas to be dependent on automobiles, whereas city dwellers more often must walk or take public transit to their destinations, increasing their daily exercise. After an explosion of sprawl in the latter half of the 20th century in the United States, some financial drawbacks were also recognized with this growth pattern. When citizens live in a larger space, often at a lower density, car usage often becomes endemic and public transport often becomes significantly more expensive, forcing city planners to build large highway and parking infrastructure, which in turn decreases taxable land and revenue, and decreases the desirability of the area adjacent to such structures. Providing services such as water, sewers, and electricity is also more expensive per household in less dense areas *. Residents of low density areas spend a higher proportion of their income on transportation than residents of high density areas. The RAC estimates that the average cost of operating a car in the UK is £5,000 a year. In comparison, a yearly underground ticket for a suburban commuter in London (where wages are higher than the national average) costs £1,000-1,500. Environmental effects An estimated 1875 square miles of forestland is lost every year in the United States. Sprawl destroys wildlife habitat, increases the risk of spread of invasive species into the remaining forest. It leads to increase in water pollution as rain water picks up gasoline and oil runoff from parking lots and roads as well as pesticides and chemical fertilizers from lawns. Fecal contamination increases in watersheds from pets. Migratory bird populations have suffered a decline as a result of forest fragmentation. Managing forest with controlled burns becomes more difficult as the forest/urban area increases. The use of the forest as a "green backdrop" in the suburbs precludes other uses, for example recreation, such as hiking, bird watching as well as hunting, fishing. Also timber harvesting is curtailed leading to job losses in the logging and forest products industries and a shift in harvest to more distance forests. Smart growth and/or New Urbanism is often espoused as a solution to city sprawl. Urban sprawl is not the only way to increase real estate development; many of the urban areas of cities in Japan, Hong Kong, and Europe which have controlled urban growth plans show higher property values than do their suburbs. Finally, some blame suburbs for what they see as a homogeneity of society and culture, leading to sprawling suburban developments of people with similar race, background and socioeconomic status. They claim that segregated and stratified development was institutionalized in the early 1950s and 60s with the financial industries' illegal process of redlining neighborhoods to prevent certain people from entering and residing in affluent districts. This is often referred to as a form of Institutionalized Racism, and one term for the resulting separation of races is White Flight. While overtly racist policies in housing are rare today, the similar price characteristics for many developments in suburbs can limit those who would choose to live there to only a certain segment of society. Some, including former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich have argued that current price discriminatory housing trends caused in part by sprawl has had negative ramifications on public schools as finances have been pulled out of city cores and diverted to wealthier suburbs. Proponents of low density development claim that it has its advantages. For example, some claim that traffic intensities tend to be less, traffic speeds faster and, as a result, air pollution emissions tend to be less intense per square mile (though higher overall). (See demographia's report.) Kansas City, Missouri is often cited as an example of ideal low-density development, with congestion below the mean and home prices below comparable Midwestern cities. Wendell Cox and Randal O'Toole are the leading scholars supporting lower density development. Proponents also claim that drivers in the United States, with the most sprawling urban areas in the world, tend to have shorter one-way commute times (though less predictable) than those who choose to commute by car in Western Europe or Japan, where densities are higher. Furthermore, longitudinal (time-laps) studies of commute times in major metropolitan areas in the United States have shown that commute times have actually decreased even though the geographic size of the city has increased. This may be due to an increase in the decentralization of American urban areas owing to non-linear transportation (automobiles). This allows for "suburb to suburb" commute in lieu of the traditional "residential to central business district" commute pattern. This may however simply be a product of the higher level of spending by US governments on increasing traffic flow and speed, while in Western Europe and Japan, much more effort is put into efficient public transport. This argument also ignores that in the high density cities of Europe and Japan, many commuters do not need to drive at all. Time spent on public transport can often be used for activities such as reading or sleeping. There is some concern that Portland-style anti-sprawl policies will increase housing prices. Some research suggests Oregon has had the largest housing affordability loss in the nation Housing Affordability Trends: USA States, but other research shows that Portland's price increases are comparable to other Western cities *. Another report suggests that zoning and other land use controls play the dominant role in making housing expensive*. Some say the ultimate argument may be that people vote with their feet and their wallets, and that many families wish to live in single family houses with lawns and gardens for their children and pets, a lifestyle which is either impossible or unaffordable in modern, heavily urbanized areas. However, research shows that many people, especially those without children at home, are increasingly interested in urban living. Past zoning policies have limited the creation of such walkable, mixed-use communities in the US, but a number of cities have recently experienced growth in urban centers designed to cater to these individuals. Urban sprawl in fiction Urban sprawl in nonfiction Working and Living in the New Economyby Robert Reich See also | |||||||||
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