Urban Sprawl

Robert. Bruegmann , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015

Abstract

The term urban sprawl has been used to draw depression-density car-oriented settlement patterns with footling comprehensive public planning. Opponents of this kind of settlement pattern claim that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally damaging, and aesthetically ugly. They accept called for more planning, growth restrictions, growth boundaries, greenbelts, open infinite conservation, environmental laws, celebrated preservation, and other mechanisms to promote many of the compact, transit-oriented cities. Other observers suggest that the problems with sprawl accept been overrated and the efforts to stop information technology are likely to be ineffectual or to backfire.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008097086874061X

Advancing environmental health in future 'wearisome cities'

Paul Tranter , Rodney Tolley , in Slow Cities, 2020

6.7 Sprawl: the link with speed

Increased speeds feed urban sprawl, or the 'dispersed metropolis' ( Montgomery, 2013 p. 46). As explained in Chapter 3, when speeds increment, the time that transport economists expect to be saved (and hence include in their toll-benefit modelling) is rarely saved. Instead, the increased speed is used to buy more altitude, which is often linked to people moving to residences farther from the city. A metropolis where 'tedious' transport modes are prioritised encourages the development of denser, better connected neighbourhoods. The affect of this is evident in the lower combined housing and transport costs in these neighbourhoods (Chapter 7), compared with that in sprawling outer suburbs, and besides in the much lower greenhouse gas emissions. The explanation for these differences rests non only in the regular commutes made by residents, only too in the land-utilize and lifestyles of adults and children in different areas of the city. In sprawling suburbs, consisting of low-density dispersed single-family houses (see Fig. ii.5), non merely is the state area per firm cake greater, there is a greater need for more paved streets and roads, more expansive drainage systems, greater need for h2o pipes, power cables, utility wiring, sewerage and other services than in denser, more walkable neighbourhoods.

Sprawling cities are also more than vulnerable to global heating. The charge per unit of increase in annual extreme heat events in the most sprawling cities in the United States between 1956 and 2005 was more than twice the rate of increase in the most compact cities (Stone, Hess, & Frumkin, 2010). Sprawling suburbs likewise crave more support with school transport, including school buses. In the United States alone, more than 25 one thousand thousand children have to be bussed to schoolhouse. The energy and greenhouse gas implications of these school trips would be negligible if children were able to walk or cycle to local schools.

Low-density sprawl is usually linked to a planning strategy based on the large-scale segregation of different types of state use. Residential areas are separated from commercial districts, retail parks, office parks and industrial parks, all with their ain supply of paved surface auto parks, and connected by loftier-speed roads. Not only practise residents in sprawling communities spend long hours commuting, but even the trip to the gym, the closest supermarket or mall often necessitates driving at speed. Speed enables the creation of dispersed cities, and once established, the dispersed state uses strength the citizens of this landscape to maintain their reliance on loftier-speed transport to access their destinations.

Sprawled landscapes also have a further indirect consequence on energy utilisation through the increase in consumerism associated with low-density living. More consumer items are required in low-density environments facilitated by loftier-speed send, including lawnmowers, more outdoor piece of furniture, air-workout and heating, landscaping, and of class, cars (sometimes several per household). In and then-called 'lifestyle blocks' still further out from the city, families 'play' at beingness weekend farmers, with the whole gamut of devices such as quad bikes, mini-tractors, pickup trucks, and utility vehicles, plus a range of recreational vehicles such equally campervans, moto-cross bikes, motor boats, jet-skis and snowfall-mobiles. Whilst this may seem positive for economical growth, these extreme levels of consumerism also crave high levels of free energy employ, currently dominated by fossil fuel energy.

Read total chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012815316100006X

Moving beyond the smart city utopia

Luca Mora , Marker Deakin , in Untangling Smart Cities, 2019

1.ane Utopian urbanism

Dreaming most the time to come of cities and conceiving new visionary schemes for improving the sustainability of urban evolution has a long tradition. In these schemes, the deficiencies of the present translate into stimuli for shaping alternative urban systems in which a new set of rules and standards, that club is expected to adhere to, go the assurance of an improved sustainability. However, despite being built on a genuine intent to amend the human being condition, some of these alternative solutions have resulted in urban utopias: unrealistically perfect spatial imaginaries whose highly symbolic rendering of the future is flawed due to the trend for the visions that they embody to be based on stereotypical ideas misrepresenting reality.

One of the first utopias was created in Ancient Greece, when Plato introduced his totalitarian philosophy of the city. Plato images cities as economic independent and self-sufficient entities in which the community is divided into three classes. For Plato, discipline, perfect obedience, and control over each unmarried member of community are the key components of a perfect guild, and they can exist secured by combining stringent authority and coercion. As Mumford explains in his analysis of historical utopias, this Greek utopia stands on principles that relate to an historical era whereby survival is based on the capacity that club has to be prepared for war (Mumford, 1922, 1965).

Following Plato'south urban imaginary, a significant amount of utopian thinking has emerged in which the stringent potency and coercion have been replaced with less militaristic ready of principles. For example, Thomas More's Utopia, a fictional island guild in the New Earth, represents ane of the virtually famous spatial imaginaries produced so far. Conceived in the framework of the urban challenges affecting England in the early 16th century, Utopia manifests itself as a future situation that stands in opposition to war, oppression, and injustice, by proposing a new social structure based on common ownership (Goodey, 1970; Wilde, 2017). Utopia's ambition to end social inequalities is also shared by Edward Bellamy and the blueprint of the perfect society that he introduces in Looking Backward: 2000–1887. In his vision, which is conceived 300   years after Utopia, Bellamy portrays the stresses of the 19th century industrial lodge of the Usa, that is, violent class conflicts, the cease of the borderland and antiimmigrant xenophobia, the labor movement, poor working conditions, poverty, and hunger. The solution that Bellamy offers is for society to replace the competitive economic organisation with a utopia that promotes universal employment and total equality (Bellamy, 1888).

Utopian visions of the future metropolis can as well exist institute into the work of some of the most influential modern architects and planners, who provided an invaluable contribution to urban evolution theory and practise. For example, the English language boondocks planner Ebenezer Howard is known for initiating the garden city movement. Shaped in the idea of progress and as a reaction to the overpopulation, inequalities, and pollution of industrial cities, garden cities were intended every bit new meaty towns surrounded by rolling dark-green belts and populated by self-contained and self-sufficient communities. These new towns were expected to grow outside large metropolitan agglomerations, on big areas of agricultural land, and to combine the desirable features of both the urban center and the countryside. Howard believed this connection between urban and rural would have set the footing for a new culture and more sustainable urban planning policies and improved living arrangements capable of ending urban poverty (Howard, 1898).

Howard's utopian thinking was greatly influenced past Looking Astern, and his work represents an endeavour to put forward a practical arroyo for testing Bellamy's utopian conceptions of future cities in a real-world setting (Howard, 1965; MacFadyen, 1970). However, the garden city experiments failed to meet the expectations. Research by Sharifi (2016) and Hügel (2017) demonstrates that garden cities have proved unsuccessful in building self-sufficient communities and addressing the needs of low-wage workers. In addition, their financial model, which was unsuitable to attract the investments of the banking sector, forced Howard to accept the merchandise-off between equitable development on the i hand and market support on the other mitt (Williamson et al., 2002; Gillette, 2010; Edwards, 1914; Falk, 2017).

Despite its limitations, the essence of the garden city movement has maintained an enduring influence and produced long-lasting effects that still resonate in urban development studies (Hardy, 1992). The principles embedded in the garden city idea have become an inspirational source for colonial planning in sub-Saharan Africa and new residential areas in Brazil (Bigon, 2013; Rego, 2014). Yeo (2019) describes the cross agency initiatives that are contributing to introduce the garden city idea into the high-density urban context of Singapore, whose ecology policy exposes its ambition to get a model green city (Han, 2017). Hou (2018) reports on the outcomes of the "Garden City Initiative" that the city regime of Taipei has launched to aggrandize urban gardens, exposing the connection between the garden urban center move and urban planning practise in Taiwan. The garden city movement has also influenced the Scottish housing reform and boondocks planning practise of the 20th century, leading to significant changes in the approach to construction of working-class housing developments (Rosenburg, 2016). In addition, there is as well evidence of a new garden city idea whose functionality has been recently tested out in York and Oxford. This 21st century version of the garden city builds on Howard'due south ideology and is proposed as a possible solution to the housing crisis affecting the United Kingdom (Falk, 2017).

The deep preoccupation for the time to come of cities and culture that stimulates Howard's utopian thinking is also shared by Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. Equally Fishman (1977: 12) states in his presentation of the ideal cities pictured past these three visionary urban planners, all of them "hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion" and the urban environments in which they were living represented "the hell that inspired their heavens." The unrealized masterplan of the Ville Radiouse (Radiant Metropolis), designed by Le Corbusier in the 1920s, encompasses his utopian vision of the future city. The Radiant City is created past following the modernist understanding of tradition, which is perceived equally a barrier to progress, and suggests building a new generation of urban environments on the ashes of 19th-century cities. Co-ordinate to Le Corbusier, nothing could solve the inefficiencies of cities and their unsustainable development patterns just demolishing and rebuilding cities infused with strict order, symmetry, and standardization. These are the main features of the Radiant City, which rises from a regular layout and a highly organized zoning organisation equanimous of the following parallel areas: satellite towns for hosting special functions, such as regime buildings; the business organisation center; railroad station and air terminal; hotels and embassies; housing areas segregated by income, which are carve up between heart-class apartments in monolithic skyscrapers for luxury loftier-density living arrangements and six-story buildings and modest accommodations for lower-income residents; factories; warehouses; and heavy industry (Hall, 1988). In addition, in the Radiant City, all the areas are connected through an intricate network of high-speed traffic roads and parking lots exposing an autocentric design that was expected to satisfy both the needs of a fast-emerging modernistic ship organization and the never-ending obsession of the Swiss-French modernist architect for automobiles (Jacobs, 1961), the aforementioned obsession that inspired his architectural work (Amado, 2011). As Le Corbusier explains in his manifesto for modern architecture, the mass-product principles and standardized manufacturing process of the automotive industry should have been considered as an inspiration for the construction sector. In his vision, building houses by applying the aforementioned level of standardization was the just way to reach a new spirit, whose elevated aesthetic of perfection would in turn atomic number 82 to the rebirth of architecture (Le Corbusier, 1986).

The standardization and strict order that Le Corbusier suggests are also the driving forces backside his utopian view of modern cities and society that is supposed to live such spaces. As Le Corbusier explains while describing his programme and idea of modern city planning, "the metropolis of today is dying because it is non constructed geometrically. To build on a articulate site is to replace the accidental layout of the ground, the only one that exists today, by the formal layout. Otherwise nothing tin save us. And the event of geometrical plans is repetition and mass-production. And as a consequence of repetition, the standard is created, and so perfection" (Le Corbusier, 1987: 220).

Chandigarh, the capital city of the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, gives a tangible form to the utopian vision that the Radiant Metropolis stands for. Immediately after the British voluntarily granted India its independence, Republic of india and Pakistan became two unlike geographic entities. As a consequence of the partition, Punjab was divide into two independent countries, and this division left the Indian Punjab without a capital city. Rather than granting the condition of capital to an existing city, the prime minister of the Indian Punjab decided to authorize the construction of Chandigarh, a new city that was expected to embody the faith of the nation in a new outset. In the 1950s, a team of modernistic architects that included Le Corbusier, his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew was invited to implement the master program for Chandigarh, a master plan that the American architect and planner Albert Mayer was commissioned to oversee the design of. Nonetheless, instead of collaborating in giving expression to Mayer'due south plan, which was already approved, Le Corbusier took the leadership and used this opportunity to test his strict zoning system and thought of a perfect form of urbanism on a greenfield site (Chalana, 2015; Chalana and Sprague, 2013; Fitting, 2002; Hall, 1988; Prakash, 2002).

The in-depth examination of the Chandigarh feel conducted by Hall (1988) and Sarin (1982) in the 1980s, which pictures the city as an incubator of poverty and injustice, uncovers the limitations of the utopian vision proposed by Le Corbusier. This vision has been harshly criticized for being affected by a "profound misunderstanding of homo nature" (Fitting, 2002: fourscore) and a lack of concern for the lifestyle habits of people (Jacobs, 1961), who were expected to accept an imposed 1-size-fits-all blueprint that was nothing but incapable of coming together anybody'south needs (Hall, 1988). The failure lays in the monumental dimension of an unrealistic vision, which has proved to be distant from the citizens of Chandigarh, and also the strong belief of Le Corbusier in the triumph of industrial standardization and mass-production methods in the architecture of future cities (Fitting, 2002; Hall, 1988; Jacobs, 1961; Mumford, 1961).

Fixing the modern city past using a new code was also the ambition of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Broadacre City, his utopian vision of a decentralized urbanity. With Broadacre City, Wright attempts to reconcile the progressive power of technological development with the magnificence of nature, 2 forces that have been drastically separated in the cities of the industrial age. Wright believed that modern technologies were offering society with the opportunity to escape the pitfalls of the industrial city and to embrace improved living arrangements hosted in rural lower-density settlements surrounded past the dazzler of nature merely without renouncing urban conveniences. In this vision, Broadacre City was conceived as the ways for reestablishing the symbiotic relationship betwixt man beings and natural environment (Wright, 1931, 1932), a human relationship that Howard, Le Corbusier, and Wright all considered fundamental for private fulfillment and societal progress.

Wright started conceiving Broadacre City in the 1924, and his vision aligns with some of the philosophical principles underlying the garden metropolis vision proposed by Howard. Wright's utopian thinking shares the same: "rejection of the big urban center (and loftier population density), the aforementioned populist antipathy to finance capital and landlordism, the same anarchist rejection of large government, the same reliance on the liberating furnishings of new technologies, and the same belief in the homesteading principle and the return to the land" (Hall, 1988: 312). However, unlike Howard, Wright does non want the countryside to absorb the life of cities to facilitate community planning, but to give every denizen a place for living as free individuals (Wright, 1932).

As Levine (2008: XI) describes, Broadacre City was meant "to offering all the advantages of modern technology without any of the disadvantages of the urban congestion and blight that many recognized at the time as a major consequence of modernity." Wright envisions a democratized society "that would be technologically advanced in practice just agrarian in organization and values" (Shaw, 2009: IV), where each family is assigned an acre, that is, the democratic minimum of land. In addition, this vision for a sustainable urban time to come was also meant to go the antithesis of what Wright considered as "the superficial suggestions of the car-fabricated utopia" (Levine, 2008: I) of Le Corbusier and the full loss in human culture this utopia was leading to (Wright, 1931), by imposing verticalization and "the tyranny of the skyscraper" (Wright, 1943: 323).

Unlike Le Corbusier, Wright never had the opportunity to build Broadacre Urban center. Still, the fast-expanding trend toward exurbanization, which the United States started registering in the 1940s, acquired the massive motility that Wright was dreaming about. Cities were gradually depopulating in favor of the countryside, where decentralized forms of communities began growing. Year past yr, Wright'south utopian vision was becoming reality (Hall, 1988), but rather than producing the benign transformations that he was strongly believing in, this trend made it possible to expose the limitations of the visionary scheme driving his "experiment in civilization" (Wright, 1932: 29).

The 1940s was a menstruum in which the growth in the demand for and supply of rural residential developments began acting as a force of change in the urban development dynamics of North American countries (Davis et al., 1994; Dueker et al., 1983; Nelson, 1990, 1992, 1995; Newburn and Berck, 2006 ). This change has generated exurbanization, a process of urban sprawl that "occurs when people movement from central cities and suburbs into the countryside " (Davis et al., 1994: 45), and it resulted in a new low-density and noncontiguous class of urbanization that has irreversibly modified the N American rural landscape. Nelson and Dueker (1990: 93) estimated that during the period between 1960 and 1985, "exurban counties deemed for nearly a tertiary of the share of continental US growth," and they also expanded "faster than all other counties in both nominal and share-of-growth terms."

This migration pattern from urban to rural was triggered by a combination of multiple factors. On the one hand, at that place are socioeconomic and political conditions. The living arrangements offered past suburban and urban areas were unsustainable, especially when seeking for affordable real manor (Sutton et al., 2006), and the urban policy promoted past the federal government was undoubtedly favoring "new construction over rehabilitation or reuse of buildings, highways over public transit, converting open space to urban uses over leaving it solitary, structure of single-family (owner occupied) over multiple-family (renter) housing, growing areas over depressed ones, and new locations over sometime ones" (Nelson and Dueker, 1990: 91). On the other hand, new telecommunication technologies (radio, telephone, and telegraph) and mod mobility, combined with the advent of flextime, decentralized working, and manageable commuting costs, were offering the possibility to benefit of urban conveniences simply from the natural setting of rural areas (Nelson and Dueker, 1989).

Over the last five decades, urban sprawl has drastically changed land-use dynamics and the spatial distribution of population in US countries, and information technology has generated a number of sustainability challenges affecting the agrarian landscape. A big number of new rural developments have resulted from this decentralization process in which the land consumed per unit of measurement of housing is higher than urban and suburban developments (Nelson, 1992; Newburn and Berck, 2006; Heimlich and Anderson, 2001; Theobald, 2001; Sutton et al., 2006; Nelson and Dueker, 1989). This phenomenon has caused a high level of land fragmentation that is found responsible for:

●

altering natural habitats by disrupting wildlife, hydrologic systems, free energy flows, and biodiversity (Alberti and Marzluff, 2004; Dale et al., 2005; Chalfoun et al., 2002; Grimm et al., 2008; Hansen et al., 2005; Newburn and Berck, 2006; Merenlender et al., 2009);

●

decreasing agronomical and wood productivity (Hasse and Lathrop, 2003; Carsjens and van der Knaap, 2002);

●

increasing the costs for public service provision and the overinvestment in the construction of ship infrastructure (Brueckner, 2000; Hasse and Lathrop, 2003; Zhao, 2010; Kunstler, 1993);

●

the disappearance of culturally relevant open spaces and natural amenities (Deller et al., 2001; Schipper, 2008; Swensen and Jerpåsen, 2008).

What is more, amidst the negative externalities documented over the years in relation to sprawl dynamics, Frumkin (2002), Ewing et al. (2003) and Lopez (2004) accept also included the adverse impacts on public health. Their inquiry demonstrates that "the adverse impacts of sprawl do not fall equally across the population" (Frumkin, 2002: 212), just residents of sprawling areas tend to exercise less, weigh more, and take greater prevalence of hypertension than residents of compact urban areas (Lopez, 2004; Ewing et al., 2003).

Once once more, this demonstrates that sustainable urban development, which utopian visionaries like Wright, Howard, and Le Corbusier were so passionately trying to reach, cannot materialize through simplistic sets of universal rules and standards, considering they volition ever fall short of understanding the complication of urban life. No perfect lawmaking or design for cities exists that can remedy all societal problems, improve the human status, and instill the primal principles of sustainability and republic that mod lodge seems to take partially lost over the years. For as many commenters advise, approaching sustainable urban development past using autocratic and meridian-down visionary schemes can produce nothing but the illusion of a universal panacea for urban problems (Mumford, 1956; Grabow, 1977; Hollands, 2015; Jones, 1966; Sassen, 1991).

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/commodity/pii/B9780128154779000013

Planning Issues and Sustainable Development

Peter Newman , in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2d Edition), 2015

City Size and Sustainability

Many planners subscribe to the view that, on environmental grounds (and other criteria), cities would be better if they were smaller (Troy, 1996; Morris, 1982). This is an old planning contend, for example, Fischer (1976) shows how optimum size cannot be found on whatever social or economical variable, but the debate has new currency in low-cal of the current motion to seek 'smart growth' and growth direction. The desire to keep settlements small is seen by many to be a major part of what sustainability means.

The evidence from studies of settlements shows that every bit cities get larger they become more efficient in energy utilisation per person and other critical sustainability variables (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Naess, 1993; Smith et al., 1998). This appears to be related to the economies of scale and density associated with bigger cities, which applies equally to technologies seen to be appropriate for sustainable development such equally transit, recycling, or the new information industries. It does non hateful, yet, that larger cities do not reach capacity limits in terms of their airsheds and water systems. But it does mean that elementary ideas of decanting people from big cities to smaller ones would not help to create a more than sustainable global future.

The bear witness suggests that smaller cities discover the procedure of achieving efficiency in economic and resource terms harder than larger cities. The strong emotional appeal of 'smallness' to our age is not, yet, without its basis. Eastward.F. Schumacher'south 'Small is Beautiful' approach, with its attack on modern gigantism, is still relevant as it suggests that all applied science needs to exist at an appropriate scale for the community that it is meant to exist serving. Community-scale technology is emerging as communities brainstorm to assert their roles – whether the technology is in villages in the Third Earth or mod large cities (Korten, 1990). The thrust of the New Urbanism and the 'urban village' movement is that communities need to be physically designed for and given infrastructure at the scale of the community, in cities both large and pocket-sized (Calthorpe, 1993).

Density and Car Dependence

In cities across the world the event of urban sprawl is firmly on the calendar. Associated with it are the bug of density and levels of motorcar dependence, and hence traffic. In the USA in 1998, 240 local governments had antisprawl initiatives on their ballots, and reductions in traffic had become a summit priority across the country. However, argue amid planners on these issues shows petty sign of resolution.

The divide continues to widen between those advocating more than compact cities and transit-oriented reurbanization (eastward.g., Cervero, 1999; Whitelegg, 1993; Roseland, 1998; Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Calthorpe, 1993; Elkin et al., 1991), and those advocating reduced densities and simply technological changes to cars (due east.g., Gordon and Richardson, 1989; Troy, 1996; Wachs and Crawford, 1991; Johnson, 1993). Some other category of planners sit down on the density/car dependence fence (e.g., Haughton and Hunter, 1994), while others run into the problems but tend to avoid the planning implications in low density, auto-dependent planning (e.g., Leitmann, 1999; World Banking company, 1996; Stren et al., 1992).

The information on density and car dependence is very clear. All cities appear to lie on the negative exponential curve of density and gasoline per capita (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999). The same relationship is seen beyond cities, so that as density increases, per capita energy goes down, well across whatever income factors, for example, Manhattan uses 500% less energy per capita than the outer suburbs of New York. The mechanism is understood easily in terms of the relative power to apply different modes as distances between land uses spread out. Information technology suggests that density is a powerful determinant of gasoline apply, and hence if cities are to develop sustainably they should be facilitating reurbanization rather than new fringe development. Other planning studies have besides shown over many decades the link between low urban density and a range of environmental problems (RERC, 1974; Berry et al., 1974).

Despite this kind of evidence there is a long tradition of planners seeing density as a problem (Newman and Kenworthy, 1989). Those planners advocating the benefits of sprawl who are associated with land or automobile lobbies tin exist discounted in debates about urban sustainability (STPP, 1994). Nonetheless, at that place are many environmental planners who also adopt the benefits of low-density planning (due east.g., Gordon, 1990; Todd and Tukel, 1981; Coates, 1981). This suggests that at that place may exist a deeper issue in this contend; an issue that as well lies behind the question of urban center size and sustainability.

Radberg (1995), when reviewing the grade of cities required to attain sustainability, described the rationale for a more than meaty city which tin conserve energy. He then set up out the course of a city for achieving green objectives that are 'related to the ecological perspective' for 'recycling and cultivation'; this metropolis is 'greener, more ruralized, more spread out.' He therefore raised the questions: Is at that place a conflict between the depression-free energy city and the green urban center? Is there a key conflict between the demand to take more urban land for the light-green city in order to practice local ecological processing, and a low-energy city with its need to minimize travel distances and hence accept a frugal utilise of state?

The resolution of this outcome as suggested by Radberg (1995) was to enable some parts of cities to be developed more intensely for reductions in energy, and other parts to be more than reduced in their density so that 'greener' activities could occur there. The evidence, however, is that those planners who back up the reduction of density are not able to take that whatsoever density increases are worthwhile (e.thousand., Troy, 1996). On the other mitt, studies of urban ecology innovations by Scheurer (1999), confirmed by Beatley (2000), found that there are no increases in ecological activity in low-density areas. Indeed, the all-time examples of urban ecology (recycling, solar design, tempest water retentiveness, permaculture …) occurred in denser developments, mostly in inner city areas where communities were able to create innovative experiments, or in intentional rural or urban-fringe communities. In the car-dependent suburbs urban ecology innovations are rare.

Newman and Kenworthy (1999) tried to resolve the issue of density and the dark-green city. They suggest that light-green innovations can indeed occur anywhere in a metropolis, although experiments may all-time exist applied in rural areas, peculiarly in places where rural population decline is occurring. However, the broader global sustainability agenda cannot be subsumed by this new rationale for density-lowering; cities need to reurbanize while conducting simultaneous improvements in urban ecology. They suggest that the difference in attitude between the two groups is as much due to confusion over where unlike approaches to sustainability should be employed. In unproblematic terms, the metropolis should be immune to become more urban, and the countryside more rural, if the multiple goals of planning and sustainability are to be met.

A resolution of this issue may non occur while people even so use the word 'sustainable' to describe extensions of depression-density, car-based development (even if designed with New Urbanist principles). The stiff accent on reductions in energy that is now associated with sustainability will probably mean that car-based development increasingly will take to exist described using other words that are less enervating of their global contribution.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080970868740256

Public ship equity outcomes through the lens of urban class

Geneviève Boisjoly , Ahmed El-Geneidy , in Urban Form and Accessibility, 2021

xiv.3 Principles behind transport equity

As discussed before, especially in the context of urban sprawl, the provision of public ship services has been seen to have broad impacts on an individuals' quality of life, and some populations are more likely to suffer from the consequences of a lack of adequate public send options. Equity issues are thus inherent to land use and ship planning, and more specifically, to the provision of public transport services. Although transport planning agencies are increasingly concerned with such problems ( Golub & Martens, 2014; Manaugh, Badami, & El-Geneidy, 2015), there is a lack of guidance on how to define and appraise equity in the distribution of transport investments beyond a metropolitan region (Golub & Martens, 2014; Lucas & Jones, 2012; Pereira, Schwanen, & Banister, 2017).

Two questions ascend when attempting to define and measure transport equity, as discussed past Pereira et al. (2017). The kickoff one relates to what should be measured to evaluate the quality of the service provided from a social perspective. The 2nd one is concerned with what constitutes a fair distribution of the service in a region. In this section, these 2 questions are briefly discussed earlier addressing, in the side by side department, the specific indicators and approaches used to evaluate disinterestedness in public ship services.

In recent years, transport researchers accept reviewed various theories of justice to hash out the distribution of benefits and burdens of transport systems. With respect to the question of what should be measured, researchers describe from Rawls' theory of justice and contend that accessibility, broadly understood every bit the level of access to opportunities, should be considered to assess the distribution of benefits provided by transport systems (Lucas, van Wee, & Maat, 2016; Martens, 2016; Martens, Golub, & Robinson, 2012; Pereira et al., 2017; van Wee & Geurs, 2011). In other words, the literature suggests that transport planners and policy-makers wishing to consider equity in the distribution of transport benefits should exist primarily concerned with the level of accessibility provided to individuals (see also Affiliate 3). This is in line with the empirical studies discussed in the previous section which take shown the importance of public transport accessibility for social inclusion. The notion of accessibility is specially relevant equally it links the provision of ship services and infrastructures with the urban class in which they are implemented (see also Affiliate 2).

With respect to what should be considered a fair distribution of services, researchers build on egalitarian and sufficientarianism theories to derive 2 principles of justice. The get-go is that a sufficient or basic level of accessibility should be provided to all individuals (Lucas et al., 2016; Martens, 2016; van Wee & Geurs, 2011). In the context of land use and ship planning, Preston and Rajé (2007) argue the lack of access to opportunities, rather than the lack of opportunities, is of business concern. Overall, researchers tend to agree that a minimum level of accessibility to some central destinations should be ensured, and that this threshold should be defined to allow individuals to meet their basic needs and participate in gild. This is far from being a simple chore, as is discussed in the next section.

The second principle of justice discussed in the context of transport refers to the equality of distribution. Although this could suggest that the benefits of send systems should be equally distributed to all individuals, researchers emphasize that what matters is equality of opportunities. Since individuals inevitably accept unequal opportunities in a lodge, given internal and external constraints, egalitarian theories propose that an unequal distribution of ship benefits should be considered to minimize inequality of opportunities (Martens, 2016; Pereira et al., 2017). Information technology is argued that individuals more probable to have limited opportunities due to financial, cultural, physical, situational (eastward.g., lack of access to information), or cognitive constraints should be provided with higher levels of accessibility (Lucas et al., 2016; Martens, 2016; Pereira et al., 2017). More specifically, researchers refer to the maximin principle, suggesting that policies should maximize the level of admission of the worst-off (Lucas et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2017). In add-on to the maximin principle, Martens et al. (2012) argue that a maximum gap in admission levels should also exist taken into account.

In sum, there is an understanding that a fair distribution of transport benefits should consider the distribution of access to opportunities. Furthermore the principles of justice highlighted by send researchers suggest that (i) a minimum level of access should be provided to all individuals, and (2) the level of access of disadvantaged populations should be maximized relative to the residuum of the population to foster equity of opportunities.

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128198223000079

Transportation and Country Use

Jean-Paul Rodrigue , in International Encyclopedia of Homo Geography (2nd Edition), 2020

Urban Sprawl and Decentralization

Dispersion and decentralization had a substantial impact on gimmicky urban forms. Urban sprawl has been dominant in Northward America since the end of World War Ii, where land was arable, transportation costs were low, and where the economy had become dominated by 3rd and 4th activities. Nether such circumstances, it is non surprising to find that at that place is a strong negative relationship between urban density and automobile apply. In the context of cities with high auto dependency, their built-upward areas take grown at a faster rate than have their populations. In addition, commuting became relatively cheap compared with land costs, so households had an incentive to purchase lower-priced housing at the urban periphery. Wherever there is motorization, a pattern of sprawl takes shape.

Although transportation systems and travel patterns take changed considerably over time, one indelible feature remains that most people are willing to travel between 30 and 40   min in one management. Globally, people are spending about i.2   h per solar day commuting, wherever commuting takes place in a low- or a high-mobility setting. Different send technologies, however, are associated with different travel speeds and capacity. As a result, cities that rely primarily on nonmotorized send tend to exist more meaty than are automobile-dependent cities. Send applied science thus plays a very important part in defining urban form and the spatial pattern of diverse activities. Still, the evolution of the urban form is path dependent, implying that the current spatial structure is obviously the effect of past developments, but that those developments were strongly related to local conditions involving the setting, physical constraints, and investments in transportation infrastructures and modes.

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081022955103270

Los Angeles, U.s.a.

Huapu Lu , in Eco-Cities and Green Transport, 2020

20.2 Urban construction and land use

Los Angeles has always been regarded as a typical case of suburbanization and urban sprawl, and is the most representative metropolis with disorderly urban sprawl and car-dominated transportation in the United States. With the development of its population and social economy, the urban area of Los Angeles has profoundly expanded. Before 1900, the urban surface area of Los Angeles changed very slowly, just between 1900 and 1940, the urban surface area increased more than 10-fold. In 1915, San Fernando Valley was incorporated into Los Angeles, which increased the urban area by 440  kmii.

The geographical span of Los Angeles Metropolitan Area is more than than 100   km in east–west and north–south directions. Less than 6% of the city'due south population is employed in downtown Los Angeles. As a result, the importance of downtown Los Angeles is relatively low compared with other cities of the same size in the United States. In Los Angeles, there are near ten subcenters in addition to the city eye. Exterior Los Angeles, at that place are 16 cities with populations of more than 100,000, and 29 cities with populations betwixt 50,000 and 100,000. Therefore, the multicenter, low-density, and horizontal urban spatial structure of Los Angeles is very obvious, and is in abrupt contrast with the single-center, high-density, and vertical urban spatial construction of New York.

Its urban sprawl makes Los Angeles continue to expand to its surrounding suburbs, and urban residents gradually motility from urban residential areas (mainly apartments) to unmarried villas in the suburbs, far abroad from the city center. The density of land use is declining, as residents motion far away from their work place and have to utilize individual cars to travel to work. Every bit a issue, urban traffic is highly dependent on cars, causing air pollution (including particulate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions), traffic jams, and high energy consumption. Los Angeles's current traffic construction and problems are closely related to its unlimited urban sprawl. Fig. twenty.1 shows a panoramic view of Los Angeles.

Figure 20.1. A panoramic view of Los Angeles.

 From Wikipedia: Los Angeles. http://zh.wikipedia.org/.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128215166000205

Rural Housing

G. Shucksmith , J. Sturzaker , in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012

The Planning System in the Uk

The Town and Country Planning Human action (1947) set the basic framework for controlling development in the U.k., one which has remained largely unchanged always since. Hall et al. (1973) in their landmark publication The Containment of Urban England critiqued the 1947 town planning organisation at some length – they looked at England, only the systems in Wales and Scotland are very similar. They ended that the English planning organisation was dominated past antidevelopment rural interests, with the outcome that urban growth was contained, to the detriment of the bulk of the population of England who – every bit a issue – live at higher densities and pay higher housing costs.

Green belts have oft been used effectually British cities to both limit the urban sprawl and to protect rural land – initially for the purpose of increasing farm production afterwards the Second Earth State of war. At present this limit is in place, every bit much as it was earlier, for the countryside's 'own sake'. Hall et al. argued, nonetheless, that this was only one of the two core elements of the 1947 Human action – alongside this limitation of urban growth, there was to be the ongoing creation of new towns, to accommodate the growing population of the Great britain. Some new towns were built in the 1950s and 1960s, but nowhere almost the scale needed to come across the boosted need or demand for new housing. Hence the planning arrangement had merely, according to Hall et al., ensured the following developments:

1.

The suburbs were pushed further away from city centres than would have been the example if the system had non been in place, as development 'leapfrogged' green belts.

2.

Housing densities in the urban areas increased.

3.

House prices were driven upward owing to a scarcity of supply in the more than desirable areas.

Hall et al. concluded that the less well-off – principally those who aspired to live in the countryside, but could non, owing to a lack of affordable housing – and those living in high-density urban dwellings had paid the price for this 'containment of urban England'. They found that existing propertied rural inhabitants had been the overwhelming beneficiaries of the organization – they continued to enjoy an undisturbed countryside and found the values of their land and belongings avails increasing at a rate significantly college than if more development had been immune.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080471631005154

Housing Supply

Grand. Buxton , L. Groenhart , in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012

UGBs and Housing Supply

The history of UGBs tin be traced back to ideas about the containment of urban sprawl. They were suggested by Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement around 1900 and were implemented in the Greater London Plan of 1944. This program used a greenbelt to place a boundary effectually London's urban evolution. UGBs are usually managed past a single government planning agency. If the area affected by the purlieus includes multiple jurisdictions, a special authorization may be created by the state or regional regime to manage the purlieus.

There is significant controversy over whether UGBs influence housing supply and price. The blazon of UGB influences housing supply. They may be hard-edged as in the European model with a clear line separating the urban from the rural or soft-edged every bit in the American model where there is a transitional area of mixed urban and rural uses. Different governance models apply to UGBs. Some are enforced past legislation, and others through the purchase or transfer of development rights on bordering rural land, or past land buy outside UGBs, or by planning or building rules. UGBs may be flexible, aimed at growth management, or inflexible, aimed at protection of nonurban land from urbanisation, or a combination of both. Growth management aims to achieve orderly country release and often to increase both development within the existing metropolitan area and public transport use. The Portland, Oregon, UGB is an example of a flexible or managed UGB; the urban boundaries associated with the greenbelts of many UK cities are examples of inflexible UGBs.

If the area within the UGB does non include enough land, the cost of residential and other development can be driven up or development can be forced to other nearby communities. If the purlieus contains also much country, it will not exist an effective tool for achieving customs goals, including growth direction. Enquiry into the impacts of regulatory measures such equally UGBs on housing supply and cost, has produced variable results that are inconclusive. Many empirical studies find little or no relationship between regulation, housing supply, and toll. General conclusions applicable to all cities cannot be drawn from research because of differing urban circumstances. Differences in international city types and weather, governance, transport systems, and land supplies pose serious challenges for researchers aiming to identify and measure the strength of causal relationships. Studies on conditions applying in The states cities, for instance, with depressed inner urban and expanding outer urban areas, cannot be easily practical to other city types, such as networked cities or those with thriving inner-city areas characterised by high-density redevelopment. UGBs affect depression-density outer urban areas with express greenfield state differently from compact cities, which maintain adequate state supplies through metropolitan intensification. Methodological differences besides help explain variable results; considering many interconnected factors potentially affect land supply and price, researchers have used different techniques to disentangle their relative impacts. A general consensus on the merits of culling methodological approaches has yet to be reached.

Read total chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080471631002770

New York, United States

Huapu Lu , in Eco-Cities and Green Transport, 2020

8.ii Urban structure and land employ

New York's urban divisions incorporate dissimilar groups of people with diverse urban life patterns. Building role, architectural form, and density, notwithstanding, are not very unlike in the different regions.

In 1968, the New York Association for Regional Planning (NYRP) suggested five principles for the second metropolitan plan to end urban sprawl:

i.

Found new urban centers, provide high-level public utilities, and transform New York into a multicenter city;

2.

Revise the zoning policy of new housing to provide more than diverse communities;

3.

Raise the level of service facilities in the onetime city as far as possible, improve the environment, and reattract people of all income levels;

4.

New urban development should keep the main parts of the region in a natural state;

5.

Create a suitable public transport arrangement.

Therefore the development of urban land in New York has been transformed, focusing on improving the density and efficiency rather than urban expansion and sprawl. According to a statistical assay, from 1988 to 2002, the area of structure land in New York City increased from 579.77   kmtwo to 622.16   km2, with a internet increase of 42.39   km2 in 14 years and an average annual increase of 3.03   km2. From 2002 to 2006, the area of construction land in New York City decreased past two.90   kmtwo. From 1988 to 2006, the per capita construction land of New York was reduced from 79 square meters per person to 75 foursquare meters per person, and the state utilize efficiency and density accept been greatly improved.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128215166000084