page_title: Urban sprawl
section_title: Definition
hierarchical_section_title: Urban sprawl / Definition
caption_attribution_description: Labeled version of Image:BosWash-Night.png
context_page_description: Urban sprawl, or suburban sprawl, is the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning. In addition to describing a particular form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. Since the advent of the industrial era, sprawl has entailed no direct disadvantages, such as the loss of protection from medieval city walls. However, its disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of countryside. The cost of building the infrastructure needed for new developments is hardly ever recouped through property taxes, amounting to a huge subsidy for the developers and new residents at the expense of existing property taxpayers. In Continental Europe, the term peri-urbanisation is often used to denote similar dynamics and phenomena, but the term urban sprawl is currently being used by the European Environment Agency. There is widespread disagreement about what constitutes sprawl and how to quantify it.
context_section_description: The term "urban sprawl" was first used in an article in The Times in 1955 as a negative comment on the state of London's outskirts. Definitions of sprawl vary; researchers in the field acknowledge that the term lacks precision. Batty et al. defined sprawl as "uncoordinated growth: the expansion of community without concern for its consequences, in short, unplanned, incremental urban growth which is often regarded unsustainable." Bhatta et al. wrote in 2010 that despite a dispute over the precise definition of sprawl there is a "general consensus that urban sprawl is characterized by [an] unplanned and uneven pattern of growth, driven by a multitude of processes and leading to inefficient resource utilization."
  Reid Ewing has shown that sprawl has typically been characterized as urban developments exhibiting at least one of the following characteristics: low-density or single-use development, strip development, scattered development, and/or leapfrog development (areas of development interspersed with vacant land). He argued that a better way to identify sprawl was to use indicators rather than characteristics because this was a more flexible and less arbitrary method. He proposed using "accessibility" and "functional open space" as indicators. Ewing's approach has been criticized for assuming that sprawl is defined by negative characteristics.
  What constitutes sprawl may be considered a matter of degree and will always be somewhat subjective under many definitions of the term. Ewing has also argued that suburban development does not, per se constitute sprawl depending on the form it takes, although Gordon & Richardson have argued that the term is sometimes used synonymously with suburbanization in a pejorative way.
  Metropolitan Los Angeles for example, despite popular notions of being a sprawling city, is the densest major urban area (over 1,000,000 population) in the US, being denser than the New York urban area and the San Francisco urban area. Essentially, most of metropolitan Los Angeles is built at more uniform low to moderate density, leading to a much higher overall density for the entire region. This is in contrast to cities such as New York, San Francisco or Chicago which have extremely compact, high-density cores but are surrounded by large areas of extremely low density.
  The international cases of sprawl often draw into question the definition of the term and what conditions are necessary for urban growth to be considered sprawl. Metropolitan regions such Greater Mexico City, Delhi National Capital Region and Beijing, are often regarded as sprawling despite being relatively dense and mixed use.
caption: This picture shows the metropolitan areas of the Northeast Megalopolis of the United States demonstrating urban sprawl, including far-flung suburbs and exurbs illuminated at night.
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