Recent Literature about Urban Sprawl: A Renewed Relevance of the Phenomenon from the Perspective of Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

The urban sprawl phenomenon has attracted the attention of social researchers since the mid-20th century. It seemed that all relevant aspects had been extensively studied and that it would be difficult to produce new studies with significant contributions. However, in the last decade, we have witnessed a revival of the literature on urban sprawl for three main reasons: (i) the existence of new methodologies to measure the phenomenon based on digital cartography and geo-referenced information, (ii) new hypotheses about the relevance of the formation of metropolitan areas not institutionally integrated into urban sprawl in many places and, mainly, (iii) the role of urban density in the environmental sustainability of cities. The recent literature on this third aspect has grown the most and around which it seems that new and interesting lines of future research will develop. The objective of this work is to present a synthetic review of the most recent literature on urban sprawl as of the end of the second decade of the XXI century. This review can serve to recapitulate the growing consensus that is being formed on the lower environmental sustainability of low-density cities and diffuse limits.

Untangling Urban Sprawl and Climate Change: A Review of the Literature on Physical Planning and Transportation Drivers

“…This review has shown that there is a significant amount of literature analyzing the relationships between sprawl and climate change and that there is a renewed interest in the topic [8]. These research efforts address different aspects of those relationships by pointing to a variety of direct and indirect links, depending on the factors and combination of factors considered.…”

“…A two-pronged approach was adopted for identifying and analyzing the pertinent literature probing the linkages between urban sprawl and climate change. The first step centered on 7 literature reviews published between 1994 to 2015 (since expanded to include two reviews published in 2020 [7,8]) (see Table 1) on urban sprawl per se, or the environmental impacts of sprawl. The works and research themes covered in these 7 reviews laid a solid foundation for further search, by allowing, firstly, to review definitions, conceptualizations, and characterizations of sprawl, and secondly, to identify potent keywords and combinations of keywords that address the linkages between sprawl, or key aspects of it, and climate change.…”

“…Its measurement is also particularly sensitive to spatial resolution and the modifiable areal unit problem (i.e., the variability of the shape and scale of the spatial unit against which the data is aggregated) [40,41]. In recent years, major advances in geospatial technologies, including GIS, remote sensing, and photogrammetric techniques have expanded the researchers' toolbox [7,8]. They have allowed in particular to measure sprawl physical characteristics more accurately across a variety of international contexts while facilitating comparative analysis [8].…”

“…In recent years, major advances in geospatial technologies, including GIS, remote sensing, and photogrammetric techniques have expanded the researchers' toolbox [7,8]. They have allowed in particular to measure sprawl physical characteristics more accurately across a variety of international contexts while facilitating comparative analysis [8].…”

A Long-Term Archaeological Reappraisal of Low-Density Urbanism: Implications for Contemporary Cities

“…Archaeological precedents provide scholars, planners, and urban experts with complete case studies of low-density cities as they have grown, flourished, and declined over 500-or even 1500-year time spans (Hall, Penny, and Hamilton 2019;Klassen, Weed, and Evans 2018). The life cycles considered by most urban-sustainability experts come nowhere near this time frame (Güneralp and others 2017;Rubiera-Morollón and Garrido-Yserte 2020). If we wish to seriously discuss the design of sustainable and resilient cities for future generations, such archaeological case studies provide valuable experiential references, or 'natural experiments', to use the terminology of Jared Diamond and James Robinson (2010), and dissolve the assumed correlation between industrialization, capital markets, and low-density urbanism.…”