Those who want to lead a government-sponsored crusade against urban sprawl have no time for such questions.
Urban sprawl is today's contrived crisis.
In so far as there is any coherent meaning to the term, urban sprawl is a name given to the fact that metropolitan areas are spreading out, with people living in lower densities in the suburbs than in the central cities. The real objection may be that all this is going on without the guiding hand of Big Brother. But the alarm that is being sounded is that farmland is disappearing under concrete as suburbanization spreads. Images are conjured up of a growing population needing more food while the land available on which to grow it is getting smaller and smaller. Another way of saying the same thing is that agricultural advances over the past century have drastically reduced both the amount of land and the number of farmers needed to grow food, even in places where the population is several times as large as before.