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Urban sprawl (also called suburban sprawl and Los Angelization) describes the growth of a metropolitan area, particularly the suburbs, over a large area. In examples of this phenomena, such as Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas, new development is often low-density, where the metropolis grows outward instead of 'upward' as with higher densities. Environmentalists and an increasing number of urban planners deplore urban sprawl for several reasons.
But Los Angelization could not be a more inappropriate contemporary term for urban sprawl. Los Angeles was one of the world's first low density urbanized areas, as a result of achieving wide automobile ownership long before others. But, Los Angeles has continued to build at much higher densities that other areas and is now more dense (2000 US Census) than any other urbanized area in either the United States or Canada. Five US urbanized areas cover more land area than Los Angeles: New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston and Philadelphia. Outside the United States, one urbanized area, Tokyo, covers more land area than the Los Angeles urbanized area.
The title of the world's most sprawling urban area depends on the definition. The New York urbanized area covers more land area than any other, at approximately 3,353 square miles (compared to 1,668 for the Los Angeles urbanized area) The lowest density large urbanized area in the world is Atlanta, which covers 1,963 square miles, with a population of 3,500,000 for a density of 1.783 people per square mile. This is approximately one-third the density of the New York urbanized area and one-quarter the density of the Los Angeles urbanized area. The world's most dense major urbanized area is Hong Kong, with approximately 3,400,000 people in 27 square miles, for a population density of 128,000 per square mile. It should be noted that Hong Kong, as a city-state, is somewhat anomalous. It is highly likely that its area would be substantially larger if it had been a part of neighboring China rather than a territory of the United Kingdom.
Urban sprawl is a synonym for suburbanization --- the geographical expansion of urban areas at or beyond their fringes. Suburbanization is often thought of as uniquely American. But in fact, virtually all urban growth in recent decades has been sprawl or suburbanization. More than 90 percent of urban growth in the United States, Japan Canada and Australia has been in suburbs in recent decades. Suburbs have captured nearly 115 percent of urban growth in major Western European urban areas, due to central city population losses ([Metropolitan Urban & Suburban Trends (http://www.demographia.com/dbx-highmetro.htm)].
 Los Angeles' large urban sprawl: About 16 million people live in the imaged area.
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, transportation 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, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia --- especially middle and upper class families--have shown preferences for the suburban lifestyle. Reasons cited include a preference towards lower-density development (since it often features lower ambient noise and increased privacy), better schools, and lower crime rates (even though car-related fatalities often make it more dangerous to live in the suburbs than in the city).
Yet after an explosion of sprawl in the later half of the 20th century in the United States, some drawbacks have emerged towards 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 infeasible, 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.
However, lower density development also has its advantages. For example, traffic intensities tend to be less, traffic speeds faster and, as a result, air pollution emissions tend to be less intense per square mile or square kilometer [International Urban Areas: Transport & the Environment (http://www.demographia.com/dbx-intlair.htm)]. As a result, commuters in the United States, with the most sprawling urban areas in the world, tend to have considerably shorter one-way commute times than in Western Europe or Japan, which have higher densities.
In addition, urban sprawl often consumes land that would otherwise be used for "natural" purposes, such as wildlife reserves, forests, and agriculture. Detractors of sprawl often espouse smart growth and/or New Urbanism. Urban sprawl isn't the only way to increase real estate development; many of the urban areas of cities in Japan, Hong Kong, and Europe which have urban growth plans show higher property values than do their suburbs.
Finally, suburbs are in large part to blame for the vast homogeneity of society and culture, leading to sprawling suburban developments of people with similar race, background and SES (socioeconomic status). 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 a district. This is often referred to as a form of institutionalized racism, and was endemic to the occurring ("White Flight") of the urban cities. While certainly not as forthright today, the similar price characteristics for many developments in suburbs automatically limit those who would choose to live there to only a certain segment of society. The lack of cultural diversity (not the manufactured diversity driven by the media and marketers) is, in large part, a symptom of the spread of suburbia. The current price discriminatory housing trend of sprawl has been argued by some, such as former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, to have ramifications on public schools as finances are pulled our of the core city to the wealthier sister suburbs.
Examples in the United States According to the National Resources Inventory (NRI), about 2.2 million acres (8,900 kmē) of land was developed between 1992 and 2002. Presently, the NRI classifies approxiimately 40,000 more square 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 ares with more than 1,000,000 population.
Nonetheless, some urbanized areas have expanded geographically even while losing population. For example, between 1970 to 2000, the population of the Detroit, Michigan urbanized area declined 2% while its land area increased 45%. Similar situations occured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, 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 occured 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 (http://www.demographia.com/db-worldcore400.htm)].
On the other hand, the state of Oregon enacted a law in 1973 limiting the area urban areas could occupy, through urban growth boundaries. In response, Portland, the state's largest urban area, has become world leader in so-called "smart growth" policies that seek to make urban areas more compact ("urban consolidation policies). After the creation of this boundary, the population density of the urbanized area increased somewhat (from 3,090 in 1970 to 3,340 per square mile in 2000) [USA Urbanized Areas 1950-1990 (http://www.demographia.com/dm-uad.htm)] [USA Urbanized Areas 2000 (http://www.demographia.com/db-ua2000pop.htm)] . However, the urbanized area still sprawled an additional 86 square miles (222 square km) through the next decade, witnessing a population growth of 411,000. In July of 2004 the Portland area increased its urban growth boundary to beyond the boundary previously planned for 2040. Even so, the Portland urbanized area remains considerably less dense than the Los Angeles urbanized area. If Los Angeles sprawled at the same density as Portland, it would cover 2.2 times as much land.
There is also a concern that Portland-style policies that limit the amount of land that can be developed will increase housing prices. Over the past 30 years, Oregon has had the largest housing affordability loss in the nation [Housing Affordability Trends: USA States (http://www.demographia.com/db-usafford1970inc.htm)]. Research by [Glaeser and Gyourko (http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2002papers/HIER1948.pdf)] suggests that most of the affordability differential between major US housing markets is the result of land use policy. In short, scarcity raises prices and critics of so-called smart growth policies believe that the housing affordabiliy losses now so apparent in the California urban areas, and places like Sydney, Melbourne, Southeastern England, Auckland and Vancouver (BC) are the result.
Urban sprawl in fiction In William Gibson's fiction, "the Sprawl" is a slang term referring to the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States. In Gibson's future, New York's City's urban area is continuous with that of other eastern cities, from Massachusetts to Florida; the entire area is formally known as the BAMA, or the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area. The following three books are sometimes referred to as Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy:
Urban Sprawl in nonfiction The Future of Success : Working and Living in the New Economy by Robert Reich
See also
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