Urban sprawl: Part two

Urban sprawl has spread throughout the world. But there is reason for hope

Last week I looked at the first developments of urban sprawl, the history of its modern beginnings in the 1940s, and some of the conditions, policies, and technologies that led to our modern suburban life. Today, I look at how sprawl has taken over the world, and the reasons—as bad as sprawl can be—to find some hope.

In reviewing modern urban sprawl, I was struck by how, from its very beginnings, sprawl was rightly perceived as problematic. Urban planners warned of the difficulties in accommodating more and more streets and houses, while social critics derided the burbs as boundless swaths of social conformity.

Songwriter Malvina Reynolds gave Pete Seeger his only hit song with Little Boxes, a satirical look at suburban conformity. Seeger sang of sprawling suburbs as “little boxes made of ticky tacky.”

Ticky tacky aside, the criticism of the suburbs is well-deserved from an environmental viewpoint. Individual homes use more energy for heating and air conditioning than do condominiums and apartment complexes. Square foot for square foot, most apartments, even condos, are smaller than suburban homes. For example, a New York apartment averages a cramped 866 square feet, while the median size of a new, single-family suburban home in 2017 averaged 2,426 square feet. That’s almost three times the area to heat and cool. And most apartment dwellers usually have only one wall facing the outdoors that can affect indoor heating and air conditioning.

Additionally, the burbs increase the number of streetlights and require the use of individual cars. It is no wonder researchers finds urban expansion promotes electricity use and leads to higher greenhouse gas emissions. Burbs also increase light pollution.

The sprawling U.S.

Besides New York and Los Angeles, the rest of the U.S. has been beset by sprawl. Large, small, and mid-sized cities from Cleveland to Philadelphia have sprawled into neighboring farms and forests. Further exacerbating sprawl for almost every city is “leapfrogging development,” in which developers skip over lands adjacent to urban areas and purchase cheaper acres farther away from city cores for their expanses of houses or office parks, thus extending the burbs even farther from their city centers.

Lax zoning and regulations have led Houston, Texas, to earn the dubious distinction of being the “poster child” of urban sprawl. In nine years, from 1997 to 2016, the city built up or paved over the equivalent of 187,000 football fields around its metro area. In the very early sixties, my family lived in Atlanta, a somewhat sleepy mid-sized metropolis at the time. Today, the suburbs of Atlanta comprise an expanse of 39 counties, an area as large as Massachusetts.

What had been a particularly American problem, has now become a problem the world over. From 1990 to 2014, urban sprawl almost doubled worldwide. We tend to think of the U.S. as the sprawl capital of the world, but that dubious distinction falls to Europe. From 1987 to 2000, European cities expanded by an annual rate of around six-and-a-half percent, outstripping the rest of the world by almost 25 percent. Europe has a lot of people, so it’s easy to understand the resulting sprawl. Without a corresponding concentration of people, North America still has some of the highest amount of urban sprawl per person.

Since the early 1990s, some of the fastest rates of sprawl have been in regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Johannesburg is noted for having virtually unchecked sprawl. India’s larger cities are getting larger and larger burbs. In March of this year, local leaders expressed concern that the farmlands of Gujarat were being overrun by the sprawl of the nearby city, Ahmedabad. Karachi and other cities in Pakistan are now beset with expanding suburbs and highways, and sprawl is overtaxing Lahore’s outdated sewage system.

Recent research indicates that cities around the world have sprawled far more than scientists had previously thought. Using satellite tracking, researchers at East China Normal University in Shanghai and Princeton University evaluated urban growth between 1985 and 2015. During that time period, urban areas expanded by 80 percent. The study found that, worldwide, our rate of sprawl exceeded world population growth. Each year, we bulldozed and built up 3,740 square miles of land, an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. The researchers found that we have urbanized the planet at a rate four times greater than previously estimated.

Reasons for hope

This all seems to paint a bleak Malthusian picture, but things may be turning around. For whatever reason, sprawl seemed to have peaked across the globe in the 1980s and 1990s and has slowed since. Cities and their cores are densifying now. Even places like Houston have started to densify.

Research published in the August 2024 issue of Nature Cities confirms this shift. In this new study, the American and German authors examined over 1,550 cities from around the world and monitored their growth from 1993 to 2020.

As with previous studies of sprawl and urban development, this new study used satellite data to see how cities and suburbs stretched out across the landscape. The authors also relied on some clever data extraction to measure vertical expansion. They found that many cities have progressed from growing out to growing up.

Across the continents, the authors noted a general pattern. City centers rise first, followed by surrounding environs. This follows what can be observed in San Diego, where I live. The downtown experienced a resurgence of construction of high-rise condos and office buildings about 15 years ago. And now, changes in zoning laws have brought six- and seven-story condominiums to neighborhoods within a five- or six-mile radius of San Diego’s city core.

Densifying cities is good news in fighting pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and general quality of life for urban dwellers. The one fly in the ointment could be the self-driving car. Researchers in Australia conducted a survey in which respondents expressed expectations for self-driving automobiles. Most folks said owning an autonomous vehicle wouldn’t change where they lived, but 11 percent indicated that, with a self-driving car, they would move to the burbs or even farther out in the boonies.

How about you? Live in the burbs? Or do you prefer a city life? Do the suburbs create more problems than those covered here? Or are the problems overblown? Please share your thoughts by clicking the “Leave a comment” button below.

More social commentary on the burbs from The Monkees.

You can find me on social media at: paul4earth.bsky.social