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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 12:10, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
I am making no edits to the article, but this article is very biased--it has so much POV that it is basically an opinion piece. It is full of loaded language and not everyone thinks that "urban sprawl" is a great evil. The truth is most want to live in low density neighbors, otherwise there would be a large market demand showing otherwise. This article needs major work to become less POV. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.35.107.58 ( talk) 03:40, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
This article represents the bottom of the pile as wikipedia articles go. It's conspicuously anti-sprawl, and the arguments for and against are completely OR, with no citations whatsoever. It all sounds like an op-ed or someone's personal website. If there are no objections, I'm going to begin the process of stripping this thing down to where it's actually supported by sources.-- Loodog 22:33, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Loodog: I think that I've got the first part of the entry under control. It is no longer normative (pro/con) but descriptive. I'm going to move the weasel words warning to the second half of the article, where it still seems a problem. -- Nicolo Machiavelli 09:35, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
I am going to delete this:"Notwithstanding these disadvantages, some government officials[who?] and private business employers contend that sprawl has certain advantages, such as more single family residences on larger lots, lower land prices, and higher profits for businesses due to the lack of laws limiting urban sprawl.[citation needed]" because there are no citations. -- The Coffee Powered Liberal 4:40, June 01 2011 (UTC)
This article has once again been taken over by anti-sprawl activists; it is anything but objective and impartial as required by Wikipedia. In my view, it needs to be introduced as a political concept and all charges against sprawl backed up by sources. As it stands now, the article itself is sprawling, and needs to be tightened to a few main points (arguments for/against, manifestations of sprawl, examples from around the world and, possibly, links to measures that stimulate and impede sprawl. (Preceding comment by Nicolo Machiavelli)
"Currently, the largest shopping mall in the world is the West Edmonton Mall" actually now the biggest mall in the world is one in china, and over the next 5 years the 4 biggest malls in the world will be there as well...I don't have the info right now as to edit it the way it should. But maybe someone would like to investigate.... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 189.128.75.124 ( talk) 03:13, 5 December 2006 (UTC).
You're right. I changed it. When I get time, I'll link to the source. Thanks! -- Nicolo Machiavelli 22:15, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Johannesburg is listed as a city in an undeveloped country. South Africa is recognised as a developed country (1st world) according to the UN.
"Today, the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area is denser than any other in the country.[29]" This CANNOT be correct! Ángel.García 131.188.3.21 ( talk) 14:50, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
Here is a website about tall buildings proposed for future cities to stop urban sprawl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illinois. Would you like to add this to the website? Sundiiiiii 04:10, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Do you think we should add a paragraph about the "Great American Streetcar Scandal"? I already added a link to that wiki article. Sundiiiiii 15:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Could everyone help find a website that says we could (& should) quickly eliminate all vehicles to save the earth by building only Tower cities connected to maglev trains? There's got to be one somewhere. Thank you. (T&T are what we should have built in the first place, which would have destroyed capitalist slavery for wages, & saved millions of lives. & T&T are the only way to save the earth.) Sundiii 03:20, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
They claim that segregated and stratified development was institutionalized in the early 1950s and 60s with the financial industries' illegal process of redlining neighborhoods...
Unless this line is meant to demonstrate that "anti-racists" tend to blur the facts when arguing a point, this should be clarified to "...the financial industries' currently illegal process..." as it was legal (and in fact instigated by US Federal Government policies) back in the 50s and 60s.
Contrary to the discussion in the archives on the subject, White Flight is not a false or tenuous concept. While individuals' racial discrimination (bigotry if you prefer) is often speciously ascribed a more conscious, conspiratorial nature than is appropriate, the legislation behind the phenomena of White Flight is a matter of public record. "New Deal" policies enacted by FDR's administration attempted to prevent forclosures during the depression era by lowering the standards of mortgage lending. The financing for this govenment-backed program was assured by a property appraisal system, and what "proved" to be the most reliable determining factor for borrower credibility was the distribution of racial demographics in a neighborhood. When this was applied through another New Deal program- the National Housing Authority- (and after WWII the GI Bill, both aimed primarily at stimulating the construction economy) you practically have the Federal Government handing money to white people who want to abandon their current housing (or demand for) and build new houses on undeveloped land- i.e. white flight -> suburban expansion (sprawl). This was perfectly legal until Civil Rights legislation in the mid-sixties, and then a grey area until 1977.
It seems to me this is more about the background of the subject matter than an "argument for", but I have as of yet not made a direct contribution to the Wiki so I probably shouldn't start with something this controversial... -- Jkwala 06:50, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
"Presently, the NRI classifies approximately 100,000 more square kilometers (40,000 sq miles) (an area approximately the size of Kentucky) as developed than the Census Bureau classifies as urban. "
As of the last edit, this read:
"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. "
I was going to revert it when I realized I have no idea what the sentence is trying to say in either case. Anyone?-- Loodog 01:18, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Loodog: I think this just a way of counting up the amount of urban land in the USA.
I have been trying to fix this article and just got to this section. Actually, I think we could just delete the whole thing (section on examples in the US). The problem with trying to measure sprawl is that data is collected within administrative boundaries that are different sizes. According to the US Census bureau, LA is more dense than NYC (which we all know is untrue) because LA does not include suburbs and NY is wider. At the metro level LA could be more dense, but at the city level not. Maybe just explaining this problem in a coherent manner would be a better contribution than these rather confusing statistics.--
Nicolo Machiavelli 11:45, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Census data has never claimed that LA is denser than NYC. Those are cities. However, the LA urban area is denser than the NYC urban area. Each of those urban areas encompass about 8 times more land than the core city. 68.180.38.31 ( talk) 00:14, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
-- Loodog 17:43, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, the edit (than => as) does not seem to make sense. Since the NRI classifies MORE land as developed, this is an unequal comparison. You would use AS if the amounts classified were equal. Now... do I make sense? --
Nicolo Machiavelli 21:42, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
this article needs work.. there are words missing or something
please fix it! :)
I spent some time today cleaning up the article. I added a number of citations so I removed the original research warning box from the page. I also cleaned up the POV in the support / opposition section and removed some uncited text. Please let me know if you have comments or suggestions on areas that can be further cleaned up. Midwestmax 23:21, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
I spent some time today cleaning up the article. I added a number of citations so I removed the original research warning box from the page. I also cleaned up the POV in the support / opposition section and removed some uncited text. Please let me know if you have comments or suggestions on areas that can be further cleaned up. Midwestmax 23:21, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/urbanmyth/
http://www.slate.com/id/2129636/
The main points seem to be:
I'm not going to make any edits to the article, yet at least. I think you can tell /my/ POV from this. I think the article shouldn't ignore the hard evidence presented that sprawl is a "myth", at least in terms of it being new, a pressing problem, or accelerating.
In addition, the "proponents" aren't "pro"-anything. Rather most of them do not see it as a problem. It's really misleading to present this as an issue you can be pro-or-con on.
Gigs 06:23, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
There is "forced" higher density & lands that are off limits from people using their property rights to build. Those conditions are only in a handful of states. Almost wherever there are housing prices much above the national median, there are more restrictions, usually disguised under the misnomer of smart growth. 68.180.38.31 ( talk) 00:20, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
In the Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2007 Issue, Witold Rybczynski writes on sprawl, or rather on “Scatteration”. Rybczynski's article Suburban Despair is listed in the Wikipedia article sprawl.
There are four things that WR addresses: sprawl causes urban poverty; sprawl uses up land; sprawl is much less dense in population than metro-cities; and sprawl is identified with traffic / development / instability / overcrowding / car pollution.
The first is answered by Anthony Downs, a sprawl critic and a Brookings Institute researcher – he surprisingly saw no correlation between urban decline and sprawl (sic, suburbanization). Unfortunately this data and the references weren’t available with the article.
The second is answered by the fact that we could house everyone in the US in a land mass the size of Oregon at one family per acre. In fact, far from scatteration using up land on a regional or national basis, the total wilderness area has steadily increased in America and subproductive farmland has been abandoned.
The third is answered by puncturing another of our urban myths. Los Angeles, sprawl city, has a higher density for its metropolitan area than New York, and it has the fewest miles of freeway per capita of any US city (that explains the time it takes to get to LAX from Burbank). The lowest density cities are the old cities, not the new cities of the West and South. The average gross population of our cities is ~2800 per square mile – while suburbia comes in at ~2100. That is hardly a significant difference.
As to point four, sprawl degrading quality of life in the suburbs and in the environment – its possible that sprawl is the symptom of real driving forces rather than a root cause itself. Rybczynski lists three conditions that make Scatteration an understood effect rather than a cause. First, the population in America goes up by 2 million yearly, largely due to immigration. This drives a housing market and creates a need for more housing. Secondly, prosperity increases steadily and lifestyle expectations follow – the cities have not solved the problem of providing newer, better equipped, and larger homes. Finally, American economics drives job mobility and shifts the location of jobs. Mobility means that the workforce is shifting constantly, often to where there is a housing shortage. These three causes make Sprawl seem a logical outcome, not a national shame.
At the end of the article WR spends quite some space on the idea that sprawl can be smart development (the new urbanized village, updated for the 21rst century). At the end of the day, the USA is a nation of suburbs, so the real task is to make those suburbs as livable as possible, and connect them together at minimum cost environmentally and economically.
So do I believe that Scatteration is a good or bad thing based on this article? The jury is out, but it’s clear that we Americans have been making some of our political decisions based on ill-founded opinions and prejudices. Sloppy thinking shouldn’t be acceptable to us, nor should we be looking for single big villains, like Sprawl if we really want to improve the quality of American life.
ohjammer, Angel Fire New Mexico,
Ohjammer 22:27, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Someone added that higher density correlates to higher prices, indicating a shortage of higher-density housing relative to its demand. Not true. Central Falls, Rhode Island has one of the highest densities in the country, yet land value is low, because it's poverty-striken. Often poverty correlates with density. At the other end, we have clean and affluent established city neighborhoods like Manhattan, which have high density. So it's not simply supply and demand on low density neighborhoods against supply and demand on high density ones, so much as which ones they are.-- Loodog 19:43, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
"Fast food chains are common in suburban areas." Well, yes, just as they are common in urban areas. I'm not sure what the point of this section is. Is there research saying that fast food chains are more common in suburban areas, on a per capita basis? My completely anecdotal personal experience, as someone who lives in suburbia but works downtown, says this is false. My B.S. detector says the same thing. The references made only assert that fast food chains accelerate sprawl, but I don't see anything that states how this is measured. 131.107.0.75 17:51, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
This is a crazy debate.
Why should the photograph be removed? Honestly its probably one of the most appropriate images in the article. You have an area experiencing rapid population growth in a state the Census ranked an overall position of number 5 for the entire decade of the 90s and is this year ranked number 6. Jordan Landing has been called a catalyst for igniting growth all around it. Jordan Landing is characterized by a "gone to hell suburban cultural wasteland replete with national chain stores", it was built in a formerly rural area, it is massive and expansive, and it is regularly blamed for overwhelming infrastructure (even the electrical grid). I can point out many other photos on this page that quite frankly add nothing, I mean who hasn't seen one farm turn into an apartment complex? And with Jordan Landing what says suburban sprawl more than one its three "super" stores. 71.219.90.110 15:34, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
In many suburban communities, even stores and activities that are close by are contrived to be much further, by separating uses with fences, walls, and engineered drainage ditches.
Is this really intentional on the part of the designers, or is it just a case of completely automobile centric vision? Is there any evidence that strip mall designs actively want to discourage peds and bikes? If so, what is their motive? -- Jaded-view 17:00, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
I think there should be talk of all the subsidies that sprawl gets. Its, I think, the real reason we have sprawl.
In many places, governments are prohibited from charging for the (full) cost of adding the capacity to schools, parks, libraries, water supply (both source and main pipes), sewage disposal (both main pipes and plant), garbage disposal, arterial roads, police stations, fire stations, hospitals, etc that new development uses.
In addition, in lower density development, streets, transit service, water pipes, sewer pipes, electricity lines, telephone lines, cable television lines, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, postal service, UPS/FedEx/DHL/other mailing services, pizza/other delivery services, police, fire protection, etc must all travel/be extended farther to reach the same amount of people. Yet these people often do not have to pay the increased cost it takes to provide these services vs. in more compact/already developed areas. Jason McHuff 07:39, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 12:10, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
Some of the points in Criticism overlaps with Response, should move them to either side and let the response be actual counterarguments, please... 124.82.15.61 15:54, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm very tempted to protect this article for a couple of days. Please stop the edit war and address the issues on this talk page. -- Donald Albury 23:13, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
I think it's misleading to give Helsinki as an example of urban sprawl. True, it has a very low population density but this is planned and distributed in a very different manner to the American and Australian cities otherwise listed. Much of Helsinki is composed of relatively small clusters of medium-high density housing, often three-story apartment blocks, surrounded by woodland and parks, rather than an endless array of large, detached houses with private gardens. Helsinki was actually carefully planned in this manner, and it creates walkable, centered, serviced communities whilst giving a great deal of space per person as well as a semi-rural feel. 212.20.248.186 ( talk) 14:18, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
The petroleum consumption graph in the article should be removed. The data is over 20 years old and is probably horribly inaccurate. UrbanNerd ( talk) 13:15, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
I don't know why UrbanNerd is determined to keep a low resolution landsat of Boston, but Boston and the surrounding communities comprise one of the densest regions in the United States (see List of U.S. states by population density with Massachusetts ranked third, the Boston metro area of course being the densest region of Massachusetts). This region is not only dense, but also old, with settlements (including those outside of Boston proper) dating to the 17th century. No doubt, there must be some modern subdivisions captured in the landsat image, but the resolution is so poor that readers will not be able to differentiate new from old. Lastly, the region is served by the third largest commuter rail system in the United States by ridership, and the fourth largest rapid transit system. It is, therefore, a terrible image with which to depict sprawl, which is defined in this article as more recent, car-dependent suburbs. Fletcher ( talk) 17:12, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
It looked like someone added a sentence from a paper in the 2nd paragraph just to have it on the wiki page...it was out of place and made no sense whatsoever so I removed it Random2001 ( talk) 16:05, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
If urban places are defined in terms of walkability, and sprawling places are defined in terms of their drivability and lack of walkability, then urban sprawl is an oxymoron. At best, "urban" and "sprawl" are difficult to reconcile. To the uninitiated, it would appear that sprawl is a characteristic of urban places since it's usually referenced by the term "urban sprawl.
Similar confusions arise from terms like "urban development" and "urbanization." Both of these terms are used to refer to all forms of metropolitan development, even suburban greenfield development, which is universally understood to be suburban, by both proponents and detractors of suburbs.
The term "urban sprawl" is misleading. For the purposes of Wikipedia, maybe there should be a change in the name of the article to "Sprawl," with a disambiguation page listing of "Sprawl (planning concept)." Oldsanfelipe ( talk) 15:30, 19 July 2013 (UTC)oldsanfelipe
The Northeast Megalopolis (Boston, New York, Washington, and areas in between) is a horrible example of urban sprawl. It's large, and taken in aggregate it's not very dense, but the majority of the population is clustered in urban centers with density far higher than, say, Los Angeles. Many people in New York who can afford cars choose not to buy them because the public transportation infrastructure really is that good. Just because a metropolitan area is geographically large doesn't mean it's sprawling. I've taken down the satellite image of BosWash. Hopefully someone can find a better image to illustrate the phenomenon. Quodfui ( talk) 23:19, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Urban sprawl's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "Jenkins":
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 02:49, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Urban planners and geographers define, measure and describe sprawl mainly by the physical characteristics of urban development and land use. They are mostly focused on discovering various adverse effects associated with a sprawled pattern of urban development. Economists first try to understand the human behavior that causes urban sprawl. Secondly, economists focus on whether more or less urban sprawl is a consequence of a more efficient allocation of resources. Armed with such understanding, economists then can evaluate various fiscal instruments and government policies that improve resource allocation and see how such improvements change urban sprawl. The tools used by economists are theoretical models of urban development that can be solved under simple assumptions, as well as more advanced models of various degrees of complexity and sophistication that are calibrated with data and are solved numerically using computers.
Anas and Rhee [1] made a distinction between geographic and economic sprawl. Their definition of geographic sprawl is the total land in an urban area that is covered by roads, buildings or other structures and private yards and this is either the same or similar to the various physical definitions used by non-economists. They defined economic sprawl as the total cost of the trips that people make in commuting, in shopping, and in interacting with each other etc. The challenging idea here is that there can be enormous geographical sprawl with little economic sprawl or a great deal of economic sprawl with little geographic sprawl. It all depends on the preference for and feasibility of low density living on the one hand, which increases geographic sprawl; and the cost of travel which depends on the technology of travel on the other hand.
An important issue for economists is the difference between actual sprawl and optimal sprawl. Economists have tried to understand whether the actual sprawl that we observe in the real world is too much or too little. And this question can be asked both for geographic and for economic sprawl. To understand the optimal amount of sprawl, economists examine whether resources are optimally allocated according to the principles of economic efficiency. Resources are allocated by markets and, in the case of urban sprawl, the most relevant markets are the land, housing and labor markets of urban areas. Urban areas are characterized by important externalities that cause resources to be allocated inefficiently. Perhaps the most important such externality is road traffic congestion and it is intimately related to land use. Each car traveler produces a trip by getting on the road and thus occupying some road capacity which delays others, but the traveler does not pay for the cost of the delay that he/she imposes on others. Therefore traveling is underpriced and the private cost of traveling experienced by the traveler on a trip that takes place under congested conditions is below the social cost of the trip. This means that there will be too many trips and too much congestion. With too much congestion, the economic sprawl measured as aggregate travel cost, will be too high. But it is not clear a priori whether too much congestion will cause too much or too little geographic sprawl. Policy should be aimed at pricing traffic congestion better, the source of the externality, not aimed at reducing sprawl directly. If this is done, the level of congestion will decrease. But whether urban sprawl increases or decreases will depend on various factors. The key point is that overall economic well-being will increase by pricing congestion. Such higher economic welfare can be associated with more sprawl or with less sprawl.
The monocentric model refers to a very simple tool used by urban economists to understand cities. In this model, it is assumed that all work happens in only one city center or downtown but workers reside in housing spread all around the downtown. In the basic monocentric model, economists assume that job locations in the downtown are not allowed to change no matter what happens. Using such a model in the 1970s, before urban sprawl had entered common parlance, Arnott [2] and Kanemoto [3] showed that if congestion is unpriced the urban area would be too spread out, covering too much land. Pines and Sadka [4] took this result a step further by arguing that urban growth boundaries that limit urban land expansion would work as a good substitute for congestion tolling in a monocentric city in which congestion pricing cannot be implemented.
This issue was studied in three different contexts that depart from the assumptions of the monocentric model, and in each context it was shown that more geographic sprawl can indeed be the consequence of reducing the congestion externality and the total road cost of travel. The first context is the suburbanization model of Anas and Rhee [5]. They showed that when congestion tolls are levied on road traffic, it can occur that more residents choose to reside and work in the suburbs in order to avoid the higher congestion tolls associated with the longer commuting from the suburbs to the city. As this happens, the suburban and total urban land areas expand. So economic sprawl decreases while geographic sprawl increases as economic welfare improves. The actual geographic sprawl before the tolls are levied is too little. The policy implication of this result is that when pricing congestion is not possible, planners could adopt policies that give suburbs more room to expand at the expense of agriculture (expansive as opposed to restrictive urban growth boundaries), lowering the price of suburban residential land, thus inducing more people to live and work in the suburbs, which in turn reduces the cost of travel but does so by increasing the total suburban land area. In a different context, Anas and Pines [6] showed that if there are two unequal-in-population cities in which all residents are employed in the downtowns only, then when congestion is priced in both cities, population will shift from the larger more congested city to the smaller less congested one causing congestion to decrease in the larger city, and to increase in the smaller city, while the sum of congestion in both cities decreases. Geographic sprawl in the large city decreases, but it increases by more in the smaller city, as economic welfare improves. Such an outcome occurs, when the elasticity of substitution between residential land and other goods is small enough so that the residents that move from the larger city to the smaller city in order to avoid the impact of the higher congestion tolls in the larger city on their disposable incomes, demand houses with sufficiently large land areas. In this case, when congestion tolls cannot be used, welfare can be improved by using a restrictive urban boundary that limits the land area of the larger city while at the same time using an expansive growth boundary that increases the land area of the smaller city. In the third context, Anas and Pines [7] modeled a system of many identical cities or towns where each city is created by a required infrastructure investment. In each city, workers can only work in the downtown. When congestion is priced, each city can become smaller in population and in land area, less dense and less congested but more cities are created which alleviates congestion by spreading the total population over more cities. While the geographic sprawl in each city decreases, the sum of the land areas of the towns increases. Again, more sprawl across the system of cities is associated with an improvement in economic welfare. These insights are important for several reasons. First, planners and geographers should not reach conclusions about the desirability or undesirability of urban sprawl unless they first understand the economic behavior that causes urban sprawl. Second, there are situations as explained above where the conclusions about urban sprawl depend on whether we are looking at only one urban area or many interconnected urban areas. Where the aim is to reduce economic sprawl, the correct policy may well be to reduce urban sprawl in each urban area, but creating more urban sprawl in the aggregate by creating more but smaller urban areas. Or the opposite may be true: to create more urban sprawl in each urban area while reducing it in the aggregate by creating fewer but larger urban areas.
Urban planners and geographers define, measure and describe sprawl mainly by the physical characteristics of urban development and land use. They are mostly focused on discovering various adverse effects associated with a sprawled pattern of urban development. Economists first try to understand the human behavior that causes urban sprawl. Secondly, economists focus on whether more or less urban sprawl is a consequence of a more efficient allocation of resources. Armed with such understanding, economists then can evaluate various fiscal instruments and government policies that improve resource allocation and see how such improvements change urban sprawl. The tools used by economists are theoretical models of urban development that can be solved under simple assumptions, as well as more advanced models of various degrees of complexity and sophistication that are calibrated with data and are solved numerically using computers.
Geographic versus economic sprawl
Anas and Rhee made a distinction between geographic and economic sprawl. Their definition of geographic sprawl is the total land in an urban area that is covered by roads, buildings or other structures and private yards and this is either the same or similar to the various physical definitions used by non-economists. They defined economic sprawl as the total cost of the trips that people make in commuting, in shopping, and in interacting with each other etc. The challenging idea here is that there can be enormous geographical sprawl with little economic sprawl or a great deal of economic sprawl with little geographic sprawl. It all depends on the preference for and feasibility of low density living on the one hand, which increases geographic sprawl; and the cost of travel which depends on the technology of travel on the other hand.
Actual versus optimal sprawl
An important issue for economists is the difference between actual sprawl and optimal sprawl. Economists have tried to understand whether the actual sprawl that we observe in the real world is too much or too little. And this question can be asked both for geographic and for economic sprawl. To understand the optimal amount of sprawl, economists examine whether resources are optimally allocated according to the principles of economic efficiency. Resources are allocated by markets and, in the case of urban sprawl, the most relevant markets are the land, housing and labor markets of urban areas. Urban areas are characterized by important externalities that cause resources to be allocated inefficiently. Perhaps the most important such externality is road traffic congestion and it is intimately related to land use. Each car traveler produces a trip by getting on the road and thus occupying some road capacity which delays others, but the traveler does not pay for the cost of the delay that he/she imposes on others. Therefore traveling is underpriced and the private cost of traveling experienced by the traveler on a trip that takes place under congested conditions is below the social cost of the trip. This means that there will be too many trips and too much congestion. With too much congestion, the economic sprawl measured as aggregate travel cost, will be too high. But it is not clear a priori whether too much congestion will cause too much or too little geographic sprawl. Policy should be aimed at pricing traffic congestion better, the source of the externality, not aimed at reducing sprawl directly. If this is done, the level of congestion will decrease. But whether urban sprawl increases or decreases will depend on various factors. The key point is that overall economic well-being will increase by pricing congestion. Such higher economic welfare can be associated with more sprawl or with less sprawl.
Urban sprawl in the monocentric model
The monocentric model refers to a very simple tool used by urban economists to understand cities. In this model, it is assumed that all work happens in only one city center or downtown but workers reside in housing spread all around the downtown. In the basic monocentric model, economists assume that job locations in the downtown are not allowed to change no matter what happens. Using such a model in the 1970s, before urban sprawl had entered common parlance, Arnott [2] and Kanemoto [3] showed that if congestion is unpriced the urban area would be too spread out, covering too much land. Pines and Sadka [4] took this result a step further by arguing that urban growth boundaries that limit urban land expansion would work as a good substitute for congestion tolling in a monocentric city in which congestion pricing cannot be implemented.
When is more geographic sprawl a consequence of optimal resource allocation?
This issue was studied in three different contexts that depart from the assumptions of the monocentric model, and in each context it was shown that more geographic sprawl can indeed be the consequence of reducing the congestion externality and the total road cost of travel. The first context is the suburbanization model of Anas and Rhee [5]. They showed that when congestion tolls are levied on road traffic, it can occur that more residents choose to reside and work in the suburbs in order to avoid the higher congestion tolls associated with the longer commuting from the suburbs to the city. As this happens, the suburban and total urban land areas expand. So economic sprawl decreases while geographic sprawl increases as economic welfare improves. The actual geographic sprawl before the tolls are levied is too little. The policy implication of this result is that when pricing congestion is not possible, planners could adopt policies that give suburbs more room to expand at the expense of agriculture (expansive as opposed to restrictive urban growth boundaries), lowering the price of suburban residential land, thus inducing more people to live and work in the suburbs, which in turn reduces the cost of travel but does so by increasing the total suburban land area. In a different context, Anas and Pines [6] showed that if there are two unequal-in-population cities in which all residents are employed in the downtowns only, then when congestion is priced in both cities, population will shift from the larger more congested city to the smaller less congested one causing congestion to decrease in the larger city, and to increase in the smaller city, while the sum of congestion in both cities decreases. Geographic sprawl in the large city decreases, but it increases by more in the smaller city, as economic welfare improves. Such an outcome occurs, when the elasticity of substitution between residential land and other goods is small enough so that the residents that move from the larger city to the smaller city in order to avoid the impact of the higher congestion tolls in the larger city on their disposable incomes, demand houses with sufficiently large land areas. In this case, when congestion tolls cannot be used, welfare can be improved by using a restrictive urban boundary that limits the land area of the larger city while at the same time using an expansive growth boundary that increases the land area of the smaller city. In the third context, Anas and Pines [7] modeled a system of many identical cities or towns where each city is created by a required infrastructure investment. In each city, workers can only work in the downtown. When congestion is priced, each city can become smaller in population and in land area, less dense and less congested but more cities are created which alleviates congestion by spreading the total population over more cities. While the geographic sprawl in each city decreases, the sum of the land areas of the towns increases. Again, more sprawl across the system of cities is associated with an improvement in economic welfare. These insights are important for several reasons. First, planners and geographers should not reach conclusions about the desirability or undesirability of urban sprawl unless they first understand the economic behavior that causes urban sprawl. Second, there are situations as explained above where the conclusions about urban sprawl depend on whether we are looking at only one urban area or many interconnected urban areas. Where the aim is to reduce economic sprawl, the correct policy may well be to reduce urban sprawl in each urban area, but creating more urban sprawl in the aggregate by creating more but smaller urban areas. Or the opposite may be true: to create more urban sprawl in each urban area while reducing it in the aggregate by creating fewer but larger urban areas — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andromeda501 ( talk • contribs) 23:22, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
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I moved the history section to Greater London Built-up Area -- PJ Geest ( talk) 08:39, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
The definition of urban sprawl should be updated to include all infrastructure that feeds the "growing needs" of cities and their fringes.
There are too many excuses for industrial wind power sprawl, which puts huge eyesores on the skyline and also requires new transmission lines through rural and wild areas. Fracking sprawl is another big problem, though not as visually evident at ground level.
The root problem is population growth, which we're not supposed to question either, along with "economic growth" driven by it and a debt-based system.
https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+sprawl+land+use — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.22.115.118 ( talk) 01:27, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
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I am making no edits to the article, but this article is very biased--it has so much POV that it is basically an opinion piece. It is full of loaded language and not everyone thinks that "urban sprawl" is a great evil. The truth is most want to live in low density neighbors, otherwise there would be a large market demand showing otherwise. This article needs major work to become less POV. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.35.107.58 ( talk) 03:40, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
This article represents the bottom of the pile as wikipedia articles go. It's conspicuously anti-sprawl, and the arguments for and against are completely OR, with no citations whatsoever. It all sounds like an op-ed or someone's personal website. If there are no objections, I'm going to begin the process of stripping this thing down to where it's actually supported by sources.-- Loodog 22:33, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Loodog: I think that I've got the first part of the entry under control. It is no longer normative (pro/con) but descriptive. I'm going to move the weasel words warning to the second half of the article, where it still seems a problem. -- Nicolo Machiavelli 09:35, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
I am going to delete this:"Notwithstanding these disadvantages, some government officials[who?] and private business employers contend that sprawl has certain advantages, such as more single family residences on larger lots, lower land prices, and higher profits for businesses due to the lack of laws limiting urban sprawl.[citation needed]" because there are no citations. -- The Coffee Powered Liberal 4:40, June 01 2011 (UTC)
This article has once again been taken over by anti-sprawl activists; it is anything but objective and impartial as required by Wikipedia. In my view, it needs to be introduced as a political concept and all charges against sprawl backed up by sources. As it stands now, the article itself is sprawling, and needs to be tightened to a few main points (arguments for/against, manifestations of sprawl, examples from around the world and, possibly, links to measures that stimulate and impede sprawl. (Preceding comment by Nicolo Machiavelli)
"Currently, the largest shopping mall in the world is the West Edmonton Mall" actually now the biggest mall in the world is one in china, and over the next 5 years the 4 biggest malls in the world will be there as well...I don't have the info right now as to edit it the way it should. But maybe someone would like to investigate.... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 189.128.75.124 ( talk) 03:13, 5 December 2006 (UTC).
You're right. I changed it. When I get time, I'll link to the source. Thanks! -- Nicolo Machiavelli 22:15, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Johannesburg is listed as a city in an undeveloped country. South Africa is recognised as a developed country (1st world) according to the UN.
"Today, the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area is denser than any other in the country.[29]" This CANNOT be correct! Ángel.García 131.188.3.21 ( talk) 14:50, 20 July 2014 (UTC)
Here is a website about tall buildings proposed for future cities to stop urban sprawl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illinois. Would you like to add this to the website? Sundiiiiii 04:10, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Do you think we should add a paragraph about the "Great American Streetcar Scandal"? I already added a link to that wiki article. Sundiiiiii 15:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Could everyone help find a website that says we could (& should) quickly eliminate all vehicles to save the earth by building only Tower cities connected to maglev trains? There's got to be one somewhere. Thank you. (T&T are what we should have built in the first place, which would have destroyed capitalist slavery for wages, & saved millions of lives. & T&T are the only way to save the earth.) Sundiii 03:20, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
They claim that segregated and stratified development was institutionalized in the early 1950s and 60s with the financial industries' illegal process of redlining neighborhoods...
Unless this line is meant to demonstrate that "anti-racists" tend to blur the facts when arguing a point, this should be clarified to "...the financial industries' currently illegal process..." as it was legal (and in fact instigated by US Federal Government policies) back in the 50s and 60s.
Contrary to the discussion in the archives on the subject, White Flight is not a false or tenuous concept. While individuals' racial discrimination (bigotry if you prefer) is often speciously ascribed a more conscious, conspiratorial nature than is appropriate, the legislation behind the phenomena of White Flight is a matter of public record. "New Deal" policies enacted by FDR's administration attempted to prevent forclosures during the depression era by lowering the standards of mortgage lending. The financing for this govenment-backed program was assured by a property appraisal system, and what "proved" to be the most reliable determining factor for borrower credibility was the distribution of racial demographics in a neighborhood. When this was applied through another New Deal program- the National Housing Authority- (and after WWII the GI Bill, both aimed primarily at stimulating the construction economy) you practically have the Federal Government handing money to white people who want to abandon their current housing (or demand for) and build new houses on undeveloped land- i.e. white flight -> suburban expansion (sprawl). This was perfectly legal until Civil Rights legislation in the mid-sixties, and then a grey area until 1977.
It seems to me this is more about the background of the subject matter than an "argument for", but I have as of yet not made a direct contribution to the Wiki so I probably shouldn't start with something this controversial... -- Jkwala 06:50, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
"Presently, the NRI classifies approximately 100,000 more square kilometers (40,000 sq miles) (an area approximately the size of Kentucky) as developed than the Census Bureau classifies as urban. "
As of the last edit, this read:
"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. "
I was going to revert it when I realized I have no idea what the sentence is trying to say in either case. Anyone?-- Loodog 01:18, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Loodog: I think this just a way of counting up the amount of urban land in the USA.
I have been trying to fix this article and just got to this section. Actually, I think we could just delete the whole thing (section on examples in the US). The problem with trying to measure sprawl is that data is collected within administrative boundaries that are different sizes. According to the US Census bureau, LA is more dense than NYC (which we all know is untrue) because LA does not include suburbs and NY is wider. At the metro level LA could be more dense, but at the city level not. Maybe just explaining this problem in a coherent manner would be a better contribution than these rather confusing statistics.--
Nicolo Machiavelli 11:45, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Census data has never claimed that LA is denser than NYC. Those are cities. However, the LA urban area is denser than the NYC urban area. Each of those urban areas encompass about 8 times more land than the core city. 68.180.38.31 ( talk) 00:14, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
-- Loodog 17:43, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, the edit (than => as) does not seem to make sense. Since the NRI classifies MORE land as developed, this is an unequal comparison. You would use AS if the amounts classified were equal. Now... do I make sense? --
Nicolo Machiavelli 21:42, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
this article needs work.. there are words missing or something
please fix it! :)
I spent some time today cleaning up the article. I added a number of citations so I removed the original research warning box from the page. I also cleaned up the POV in the support / opposition section and removed some uncited text. Please let me know if you have comments or suggestions on areas that can be further cleaned up. Midwestmax 23:21, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
I spent some time today cleaning up the article. I added a number of citations so I removed the original research warning box from the page. I also cleaned up the POV in the support / opposition section and removed some uncited text. Please let me know if you have comments or suggestions on areas that can be further cleaned up. Midwestmax 23:21, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/sep/urbanmyth/
http://www.slate.com/id/2129636/
The main points seem to be:
I'm not going to make any edits to the article, yet at least. I think you can tell /my/ POV from this. I think the article shouldn't ignore the hard evidence presented that sprawl is a "myth", at least in terms of it being new, a pressing problem, or accelerating.
In addition, the "proponents" aren't "pro"-anything. Rather most of them do not see it as a problem. It's really misleading to present this as an issue you can be pro-or-con on.
Gigs 06:23, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
There is "forced" higher density & lands that are off limits from people using their property rights to build. Those conditions are only in a handful of states. Almost wherever there are housing prices much above the national median, there are more restrictions, usually disguised under the misnomer of smart growth. 68.180.38.31 ( talk) 00:20, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
In the Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2007 Issue, Witold Rybczynski writes on sprawl, or rather on “Scatteration”. Rybczynski's article Suburban Despair is listed in the Wikipedia article sprawl.
There are four things that WR addresses: sprawl causes urban poverty; sprawl uses up land; sprawl is much less dense in population than metro-cities; and sprawl is identified with traffic / development / instability / overcrowding / car pollution.
The first is answered by Anthony Downs, a sprawl critic and a Brookings Institute researcher – he surprisingly saw no correlation between urban decline and sprawl (sic, suburbanization). Unfortunately this data and the references weren’t available with the article.
The second is answered by the fact that we could house everyone in the US in a land mass the size of Oregon at one family per acre. In fact, far from scatteration using up land on a regional or national basis, the total wilderness area has steadily increased in America and subproductive farmland has been abandoned.
The third is answered by puncturing another of our urban myths. Los Angeles, sprawl city, has a higher density for its metropolitan area than New York, and it has the fewest miles of freeway per capita of any US city (that explains the time it takes to get to LAX from Burbank). The lowest density cities are the old cities, not the new cities of the West and South. The average gross population of our cities is ~2800 per square mile – while suburbia comes in at ~2100. That is hardly a significant difference.
As to point four, sprawl degrading quality of life in the suburbs and in the environment – its possible that sprawl is the symptom of real driving forces rather than a root cause itself. Rybczynski lists three conditions that make Scatteration an understood effect rather than a cause. First, the population in America goes up by 2 million yearly, largely due to immigration. This drives a housing market and creates a need for more housing. Secondly, prosperity increases steadily and lifestyle expectations follow – the cities have not solved the problem of providing newer, better equipped, and larger homes. Finally, American economics drives job mobility and shifts the location of jobs. Mobility means that the workforce is shifting constantly, often to where there is a housing shortage. These three causes make Sprawl seem a logical outcome, not a national shame.
At the end of the article WR spends quite some space on the idea that sprawl can be smart development (the new urbanized village, updated for the 21rst century). At the end of the day, the USA is a nation of suburbs, so the real task is to make those suburbs as livable as possible, and connect them together at minimum cost environmentally and economically.
So do I believe that Scatteration is a good or bad thing based on this article? The jury is out, but it’s clear that we Americans have been making some of our political decisions based on ill-founded opinions and prejudices. Sloppy thinking shouldn’t be acceptable to us, nor should we be looking for single big villains, like Sprawl if we really want to improve the quality of American life.
ohjammer, Angel Fire New Mexico,
Ohjammer 22:27, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Someone added that higher density correlates to higher prices, indicating a shortage of higher-density housing relative to its demand. Not true. Central Falls, Rhode Island has one of the highest densities in the country, yet land value is low, because it's poverty-striken. Often poverty correlates with density. At the other end, we have clean and affluent established city neighborhoods like Manhattan, which have high density. So it's not simply supply and demand on low density neighborhoods against supply and demand on high density ones, so much as which ones they are.-- Loodog 19:43, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
"Fast food chains are common in suburban areas." Well, yes, just as they are common in urban areas. I'm not sure what the point of this section is. Is there research saying that fast food chains are more common in suburban areas, on a per capita basis? My completely anecdotal personal experience, as someone who lives in suburbia but works downtown, says this is false. My B.S. detector says the same thing. The references made only assert that fast food chains accelerate sprawl, but I don't see anything that states how this is measured. 131.107.0.75 17:51, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
This is a crazy debate.
Why should the photograph be removed? Honestly its probably one of the most appropriate images in the article. You have an area experiencing rapid population growth in a state the Census ranked an overall position of number 5 for the entire decade of the 90s and is this year ranked number 6. Jordan Landing has been called a catalyst for igniting growth all around it. Jordan Landing is characterized by a "gone to hell suburban cultural wasteland replete with national chain stores", it was built in a formerly rural area, it is massive and expansive, and it is regularly blamed for overwhelming infrastructure (even the electrical grid). I can point out many other photos on this page that quite frankly add nothing, I mean who hasn't seen one farm turn into an apartment complex? And with Jordan Landing what says suburban sprawl more than one its three "super" stores. 71.219.90.110 15:34, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
In many suburban communities, even stores and activities that are close by are contrived to be much further, by separating uses with fences, walls, and engineered drainage ditches.
Is this really intentional on the part of the designers, or is it just a case of completely automobile centric vision? Is there any evidence that strip mall designs actively want to discourage peds and bikes? If so, what is their motive? -- Jaded-view 17:00, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
I think there should be talk of all the subsidies that sprawl gets. Its, I think, the real reason we have sprawl.
In many places, governments are prohibited from charging for the (full) cost of adding the capacity to schools, parks, libraries, water supply (both source and main pipes), sewage disposal (both main pipes and plant), garbage disposal, arterial roads, police stations, fire stations, hospitals, etc that new development uses.
In addition, in lower density development, streets, transit service, water pipes, sewer pipes, electricity lines, telephone lines, cable television lines, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, postal service, UPS/FedEx/DHL/other mailing services, pizza/other delivery services, police, fire protection, etc must all travel/be extended farther to reach the same amount of people. Yet these people often do not have to pay the increased cost it takes to provide these services vs. in more compact/already developed areas. Jason McHuff 07:39, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
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Some of the points in Criticism overlaps with Response, should move them to either side and let the response be actual counterarguments, please... 124.82.15.61 15:54, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm very tempted to protect this article for a couple of days. Please stop the edit war and address the issues on this talk page. -- Donald Albury 23:13, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
I think it's misleading to give Helsinki as an example of urban sprawl. True, it has a very low population density but this is planned and distributed in a very different manner to the American and Australian cities otherwise listed. Much of Helsinki is composed of relatively small clusters of medium-high density housing, often three-story apartment blocks, surrounded by woodland and parks, rather than an endless array of large, detached houses with private gardens. Helsinki was actually carefully planned in this manner, and it creates walkable, centered, serviced communities whilst giving a great deal of space per person as well as a semi-rural feel. 212.20.248.186 ( talk) 14:18, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
The petroleum consumption graph in the article should be removed. The data is over 20 years old and is probably horribly inaccurate. UrbanNerd ( talk) 13:15, 6 July 2010 (UTC)
I don't know why UrbanNerd is determined to keep a low resolution landsat of Boston, but Boston and the surrounding communities comprise one of the densest regions in the United States (see List of U.S. states by population density with Massachusetts ranked third, the Boston metro area of course being the densest region of Massachusetts). This region is not only dense, but also old, with settlements (including those outside of Boston proper) dating to the 17th century. No doubt, there must be some modern subdivisions captured in the landsat image, but the resolution is so poor that readers will not be able to differentiate new from old. Lastly, the region is served by the third largest commuter rail system in the United States by ridership, and the fourth largest rapid transit system. It is, therefore, a terrible image with which to depict sprawl, which is defined in this article as more recent, car-dependent suburbs. Fletcher ( talk) 17:12, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
It looked like someone added a sentence from a paper in the 2nd paragraph just to have it on the wiki page...it was out of place and made no sense whatsoever so I removed it Random2001 ( talk) 16:05, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
If urban places are defined in terms of walkability, and sprawling places are defined in terms of their drivability and lack of walkability, then urban sprawl is an oxymoron. At best, "urban" and "sprawl" are difficult to reconcile. To the uninitiated, it would appear that sprawl is a characteristic of urban places since it's usually referenced by the term "urban sprawl.
Similar confusions arise from terms like "urban development" and "urbanization." Both of these terms are used to refer to all forms of metropolitan development, even suburban greenfield development, which is universally understood to be suburban, by both proponents and detractors of suburbs.
The term "urban sprawl" is misleading. For the purposes of Wikipedia, maybe there should be a change in the name of the article to "Sprawl," with a disambiguation page listing of "Sprawl (planning concept)." Oldsanfelipe ( talk) 15:30, 19 July 2013 (UTC)oldsanfelipe
The Northeast Megalopolis (Boston, New York, Washington, and areas in between) is a horrible example of urban sprawl. It's large, and taken in aggregate it's not very dense, but the majority of the population is clustered in urban centers with density far higher than, say, Los Angeles. Many people in New York who can afford cars choose not to buy them because the public transportation infrastructure really is that good. Just because a metropolitan area is geographically large doesn't mean it's sprawling. I've taken down the satellite image of BosWash. Hopefully someone can find a better image to illustrate the phenomenon. Quodfui ( talk) 23:19, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Urban sprawl's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "Jenkins":
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 02:49, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
Urban planners and geographers define, measure and describe sprawl mainly by the physical characteristics of urban development and land use. They are mostly focused on discovering various adverse effects associated with a sprawled pattern of urban development. Economists first try to understand the human behavior that causes urban sprawl. Secondly, economists focus on whether more or less urban sprawl is a consequence of a more efficient allocation of resources. Armed with such understanding, economists then can evaluate various fiscal instruments and government policies that improve resource allocation and see how such improvements change urban sprawl. The tools used by economists are theoretical models of urban development that can be solved under simple assumptions, as well as more advanced models of various degrees of complexity and sophistication that are calibrated with data and are solved numerically using computers.
Anas and Rhee [1] made a distinction between geographic and economic sprawl. Their definition of geographic sprawl is the total land in an urban area that is covered by roads, buildings or other structures and private yards and this is either the same or similar to the various physical definitions used by non-economists. They defined economic sprawl as the total cost of the trips that people make in commuting, in shopping, and in interacting with each other etc. The challenging idea here is that there can be enormous geographical sprawl with little economic sprawl or a great deal of economic sprawl with little geographic sprawl. It all depends on the preference for and feasibility of low density living on the one hand, which increases geographic sprawl; and the cost of travel which depends on the technology of travel on the other hand.
An important issue for economists is the difference between actual sprawl and optimal sprawl. Economists have tried to understand whether the actual sprawl that we observe in the real world is too much or too little. And this question can be asked both for geographic and for economic sprawl. To understand the optimal amount of sprawl, economists examine whether resources are optimally allocated according to the principles of economic efficiency. Resources are allocated by markets and, in the case of urban sprawl, the most relevant markets are the land, housing and labor markets of urban areas. Urban areas are characterized by important externalities that cause resources to be allocated inefficiently. Perhaps the most important such externality is road traffic congestion and it is intimately related to land use. Each car traveler produces a trip by getting on the road and thus occupying some road capacity which delays others, but the traveler does not pay for the cost of the delay that he/she imposes on others. Therefore traveling is underpriced and the private cost of traveling experienced by the traveler on a trip that takes place under congested conditions is below the social cost of the trip. This means that there will be too many trips and too much congestion. With too much congestion, the economic sprawl measured as aggregate travel cost, will be too high. But it is not clear a priori whether too much congestion will cause too much or too little geographic sprawl. Policy should be aimed at pricing traffic congestion better, the source of the externality, not aimed at reducing sprawl directly. If this is done, the level of congestion will decrease. But whether urban sprawl increases or decreases will depend on various factors. The key point is that overall economic well-being will increase by pricing congestion. Such higher economic welfare can be associated with more sprawl or with less sprawl.
The monocentric model refers to a very simple tool used by urban economists to understand cities. In this model, it is assumed that all work happens in only one city center or downtown but workers reside in housing spread all around the downtown. In the basic monocentric model, economists assume that job locations in the downtown are not allowed to change no matter what happens. Using such a model in the 1970s, before urban sprawl had entered common parlance, Arnott [2] and Kanemoto [3] showed that if congestion is unpriced the urban area would be too spread out, covering too much land. Pines and Sadka [4] took this result a step further by arguing that urban growth boundaries that limit urban land expansion would work as a good substitute for congestion tolling in a monocentric city in which congestion pricing cannot be implemented.
This issue was studied in three different contexts that depart from the assumptions of the monocentric model, and in each context it was shown that more geographic sprawl can indeed be the consequence of reducing the congestion externality and the total road cost of travel. The first context is the suburbanization model of Anas and Rhee [5]. They showed that when congestion tolls are levied on road traffic, it can occur that more residents choose to reside and work in the suburbs in order to avoid the higher congestion tolls associated with the longer commuting from the suburbs to the city. As this happens, the suburban and total urban land areas expand. So economic sprawl decreases while geographic sprawl increases as economic welfare improves. The actual geographic sprawl before the tolls are levied is too little. The policy implication of this result is that when pricing congestion is not possible, planners could adopt policies that give suburbs more room to expand at the expense of agriculture (expansive as opposed to restrictive urban growth boundaries), lowering the price of suburban residential land, thus inducing more people to live and work in the suburbs, which in turn reduces the cost of travel but does so by increasing the total suburban land area. In a different context, Anas and Pines [6] showed that if there are two unequal-in-population cities in which all residents are employed in the downtowns only, then when congestion is priced in both cities, population will shift from the larger more congested city to the smaller less congested one causing congestion to decrease in the larger city, and to increase in the smaller city, while the sum of congestion in both cities decreases. Geographic sprawl in the large city decreases, but it increases by more in the smaller city, as economic welfare improves. Such an outcome occurs, when the elasticity of substitution between residential land and other goods is small enough so that the residents that move from the larger city to the smaller city in order to avoid the impact of the higher congestion tolls in the larger city on their disposable incomes, demand houses with sufficiently large land areas. In this case, when congestion tolls cannot be used, welfare can be improved by using a restrictive urban boundary that limits the land area of the larger city while at the same time using an expansive growth boundary that increases the land area of the smaller city. In the third context, Anas and Pines [7] modeled a system of many identical cities or towns where each city is created by a required infrastructure investment. In each city, workers can only work in the downtown. When congestion is priced, each city can become smaller in population and in land area, less dense and less congested but more cities are created which alleviates congestion by spreading the total population over more cities. While the geographic sprawl in each city decreases, the sum of the land areas of the towns increases. Again, more sprawl across the system of cities is associated with an improvement in economic welfare. These insights are important for several reasons. First, planners and geographers should not reach conclusions about the desirability or undesirability of urban sprawl unless they first understand the economic behavior that causes urban sprawl. Second, there are situations as explained above where the conclusions about urban sprawl depend on whether we are looking at only one urban area or many interconnected urban areas. Where the aim is to reduce economic sprawl, the correct policy may well be to reduce urban sprawl in each urban area, but creating more urban sprawl in the aggregate by creating more but smaller urban areas. Or the opposite may be true: to create more urban sprawl in each urban area while reducing it in the aggregate by creating fewer but larger urban areas.
Urban planners and geographers define, measure and describe sprawl mainly by the physical characteristics of urban development and land use. They are mostly focused on discovering various adverse effects associated with a sprawled pattern of urban development. Economists first try to understand the human behavior that causes urban sprawl. Secondly, economists focus on whether more or less urban sprawl is a consequence of a more efficient allocation of resources. Armed with such understanding, economists then can evaluate various fiscal instruments and government policies that improve resource allocation and see how such improvements change urban sprawl. The tools used by economists are theoretical models of urban development that can be solved under simple assumptions, as well as more advanced models of various degrees of complexity and sophistication that are calibrated with data and are solved numerically using computers.
Geographic versus economic sprawl
Anas and Rhee made a distinction between geographic and economic sprawl. Their definition of geographic sprawl is the total land in an urban area that is covered by roads, buildings or other structures and private yards and this is either the same or similar to the various physical definitions used by non-economists. They defined economic sprawl as the total cost of the trips that people make in commuting, in shopping, and in interacting with each other etc. The challenging idea here is that there can be enormous geographical sprawl with little economic sprawl or a great deal of economic sprawl with little geographic sprawl. It all depends on the preference for and feasibility of low density living on the one hand, which increases geographic sprawl; and the cost of travel which depends on the technology of travel on the other hand.
Actual versus optimal sprawl
An important issue for economists is the difference between actual sprawl and optimal sprawl. Economists have tried to understand whether the actual sprawl that we observe in the real world is too much or too little. And this question can be asked both for geographic and for economic sprawl. To understand the optimal amount of sprawl, economists examine whether resources are optimally allocated according to the principles of economic efficiency. Resources are allocated by markets and, in the case of urban sprawl, the most relevant markets are the land, housing and labor markets of urban areas. Urban areas are characterized by important externalities that cause resources to be allocated inefficiently. Perhaps the most important such externality is road traffic congestion and it is intimately related to land use. Each car traveler produces a trip by getting on the road and thus occupying some road capacity which delays others, but the traveler does not pay for the cost of the delay that he/she imposes on others. Therefore traveling is underpriced and the private cost of traveling experienced by the traveler on a trip that takes place under congested conditions is below the social cost of the trip. This means that there will be too many trips and too much congestion. With too much congestion, the economic sprawl measured as aggregate travel cost, will be too high. But it is not clear a priori whether too much congestion will cause too much or too little geographic sprawl. Policy should be aimed at pricing traffic congestion better, the source of the externality, not aimed at reducing sprawl directly. If this is done, the level of congestion will decrease. But whether urban sprawl increases or decreases will depend on various factors. The key point is that overall economic well-being will increase by pricing congestion. Such higher economic welfare can be associated with more sprawl or with less sprawl.
Urban sprawl in the monocentric model
The monocentric model refers to a very simple tool used by urban economists to understand cities. In this model, it is assumed that all work happens in only one city center or downtown but workers reside in housing spread all around the downtown. In the basic monocentric model, economists assume that job locations in the downtown are not allowed to change no matter what happens. Using such a model in the 1970s, before urban sprawl had entered common parlance, Arnott [2] and Kanemoto [3] showed that if congestion is unpriced the urban area would be too spread out, covering too much land. Pines and Sadka [4] took this result a step further by arguing that urban growth boundaries that limit urban land expansion would work as a good substitute for congestion tolling in a monocentric city in which congestion pricing cannot be implemented.
When is more geographic sprawl a consequence of optimal resource allocation?
This issue was studied in three different contexts that depart from the assumptions of the monocentric model, and in each context it was shown that more geographic sprawl can indeed be the consequence of reducing the congestion externality and the total road cost of travel. The first context is the suburbanization model of Anas and Rhee [5]. They showed that when congestion tolls are levied on road traffic, it can occur that more residents choose to reside and work in the suburbs in order to avoid the higher congestion tolls associated with the longer commuting from the suburbs to the city. As this happens, the suburban and total urban land areas expand. So economic sprawl decreases while geographic sprawl increases as economic welfare improves. The actual geographic sprawl before the tolls are levied is too little. The policy implication of this result is that when pricing congestion is not possible, planners could adopt policies that give suburbs more room to expand at the expense of agriculture (expansive as opposed to restrictive urban growth boundaries), lowering the price of suburban residential land, thus inducing more people to live and work in the suburbs, which in turn reduces the cost of travel but does so by increasing the total suburban land area. In a different context, Anas and Pines [6] showed that if there are two unequal-in-population cities in which all residents are employed in the downtowns only, then when congestion is priced in both cities, population will shift from the larger more congested city to the smaller less congested one causing congestion to decrease in the larger city, and to increase in the smaller city, while the sum of congestion in both cities decreases. Geographic sprawl in the large city decreases, but it increases by more in the smaller city, as economic welfare improves. Such an outcome occurs, when the elasticity of substitution between residential land and other goods is small enough so that the residents that move from the larger city to the smaller city in order to avoid the impact of the higher congestion tolls in the larger city on their disposable incomes, demand houses with sufficiently large land areas. In this case, when congestion tolls cannot be used, welfare can be improved by using a restrictive urban boundary that limits the land area of the larger city while at the same time using an expansive growth boundary that increases the land area of the smaller city. In the third context, Anas and Pines [7] modeled a system of many identical cities or towns where each city is created by a required infrastructure investment. In each city, workers can only work in the downtown. When congestion is priced, each city can become smaller in population and in land area, less dense and less congested but more cities are created which alleviates congestion by spreading the total population over more cities. While the geographic sprawl in each city decreases, the sum of the land areas of the towns increases. Again, more sprawl across the system of cities is associated with an improvement in economic welfare. These insights are important for several reasons. First, planners and geographers should not reach conclusions about the desirability or undesirability of urban sprawl unless they first understand the economic behavior that causes urban sprawl. Second, there are situations as explained above where the conclusions about urban sprawl depend on whether we are looking at only one urban area or many interconnected urban areas. Where the aim is to reduce economic sprawl, the correct policy may well be to reduce urban sprawl in each urban area, but creating more urban sprawl in the aggregate by creating more but smaller urban areas. Or the opposite may be true: to create more urban sprawl in each urban area while reducing it in the aggregate by creating fewer but larger urban areas — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andromeda501 ( talk • contribs) 23:22, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
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I moved the history section to Greater London Built-up Area -- PJ Geest ( talk) 08:39, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
The definition of urban sprawl should be updated to include all infrastructure that feeds the "growing needs" of cities and their fringes.
There are too many excuses for industrial wind power sprawl, which puts huge eyesores on the skyline and also requires new transmission lines through rural and wild areas. Fracking sprawl is another big problem, though not as visually evident at ground level.
The root problem is population growth, which we're not supposed to question either, along with "economic growth" driven by it and a debt-based system.
https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+sprawl+land+use — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.22.115.118 ( talk) 01:27, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
H 2001:8F8:1471:C763:A816:B0DD:44C1:D384 ( talk) 08:33, 6 January 2023 (UTC)