An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies

Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies Annette Stomp* Chôros Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) Abstract Urban sprawl is a growth pattern causing much interest and concern and, in consequence, has been a topic of growing interest to a wide body of researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds. The past 15 years has seen a veritable flourish of intensive empirical case studies devoted to various aspects of this phenomenon and coming from an increasing variety of countries. In an effort to understand the latest currents in empirical research on urban sprawl, the author conducted a thorough review of case studies since 1996, seeking to highlight new findings among the various themes addressed in the research. They revealed a great number of case studies on urban sprawl emerging from China, many case studies devoted to measuring urban sprawl, as well as throwing into question the widely held assumption that sprawl is always driven by population and economic growth. Interest in urban sprawl was originally concentrated in North America and more recently in Europe; however, environmental, economic and social consequences associated with it have made urban sprawl a topic of growing interest worldwide. Despite many studies and efforts to manage sprawl, this form of urban growth remains challenging for urban planning. The shared difficulty in managing sprawl and growing interest in the phenomenon at an international scale are reflected in a large number of case studies from both developed and developing worlds, and from countries as diverse as Turkey, China, Chile and Nigeria. Urban sprawl is neither an American phenomenon nor a Western phenomenon only; it has become an international characteristic of contemporary urban growth. This paper reviews this recent and flourishing body of literature, the empirical case studies of urban sprawl in particular places, while pulling from it new lessons about urban sprawl in general. The interdisciplinary nature of research on urban sprawl, the vast body of literature on the subject and the speed at which new research is produced may have caused some publications to have been unintentionally overlooked. However, this review may provide a gauge as to the general currents of empirical research on urban sprawl (Figure 1). One infamous difficulty in studying urban sprawl, widely deplored throughout the literature, is the lack of a widely accepted definition. This review has found that significant progress has been made on both fronts. With regards to the definition of sprawl, nearly all case studies since the mid-2000s have recognised sprawl as a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon, which must be defined and measured as such (Frenkel & Ashkenazi, 2008). Although definitions of sprawl among the case studies were still quite varied, there were two definitions that were used more often than any other, either in their original forms or as the basis for a custom definition. A definition based on Galster’s (2001) eight dimensions represented 16% of case studies. Ewing’s (1997) definition was even more widely used (21%) and states, ‘The forms of development most often characterized as sprawl are: (1) leapfrog or scattered development, (2) commercial strip development, or (3) large expanses of lowdensity or single-use development’ (p. 108). Even though these tendencies are far from a consensus, this trend shows a certain progression in the search for a reliable and widely accepted definition of sprawl. © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies 505 Asia North America Europe Africa South America Australia & Oceania 1 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 Fig. 1. Cases per continent as percentage of total. The review identified 97 articles. In this review, I have chosen to selectively discuss those studies that are the most representative of the wider body of literature to better reveal the currents in the research. The literature on urban sprawl, which is now emanating from authors world-wide, is extremely vast, and this article in no way pretends to be a comprehensive review of that copious and ever-expanding body. It is a review of some of the more interesting, recent empirical case studies of real-world sprawl, from the increasing variety of countries publishing empirical research on this topic. For those interested in comprehensive literature reviews on urban sprawl, there is an excellent and concise introductory review provided by Gillham (2002) and a more comprehensive and recent one by Ewing (2008). There are also review articles on specific fields within the large body of urban planning literature, such as Michael Johnson’s Environmental Impacts of Urban Sprawl: A Survey of the Literature and Proposed Research Agenda (2001). Although the topic of sprawl has been around since the early days of the environmental movements of the 1970s and the concept perhaps even longer (Bruegmann, 2005), Ewing was one of the seminal authors to openly launch the debate into professional urban planning circles with his widely cited article, Is Los Angeles-Style Sprawl Desirable, in 1997 in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Since then, many works have been published seeking to define and especially measure the phenomenon, such as Galster et al. (2001) or more recently Bhatta et al. (2010). At least two editions reviewing consequences of urban sprawl have been published by Burchell et al. (2005). Edited volumes on sprawl in specific world areas have been published in English, such as Couch et al. (2007) and Richardson and Bae (2004), both on Europe; and Wu et al. (2007) on China. If languages other than English are included, then the body of literature grows even vaster, for example, see Brück and Lmg (2002) on Belgium, Rougé (2005) on France or Olvera et al. (2005) on sub-saharan Africa. As mentioned, however, this review article focuses on reviewing new and interesting findings from recent empirical research on urban sprawl, in particular case studies, and the similarities or differences in these findings from country to country. The Method Although case studies represent only one method of study amongst a vast literature on urban sprawl, this type of study was chosen for multiple reasons. One was to provide a sampling of new research emerging on urban sprawl. Case studies,1 in addition to taking a more contextually sensitive view of urban sprawl, are particularly well-adapted to complex phenomena, © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 506 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies such as urban sprawl, for which multiple dimensions and scales are necessary for thorough understanding. Excluded from this review were surveys looking at mainly statistical aspects, for example, population density, over a great number of cities. Some surveys represented nevertheless very important empirical research on the development of sprawl measures, particularly regarding multiple dimensions of measurement, for example, see Ewing et al. (2002), Frenkel and Ashkenazi (2008) and Huang et al. (2007) on global variations in spatial configuration. Excluded also were studies using one city as an example to demonstrate a technique or elaborate an argument, but lacking the depth and multiple axes of investigation of case studies. All English-language academic journals on all available databases were searched for case studies on urban sprawl during the period 1996–2011, and case studies found in books during the same period were included. The articles, upon initial reading, were suggestive of six categories, representing six different aims in the research on urban sprawl. This review is organised according to these six categories: 1. Urban growth pattern studies were what one would consider as classical case studies, undertaken specifically to understand the growth and distinctiveness of a particular city. These studies sometimes used advanced measurement systems to characterise urban growth, but the measurement system was always a tool to gain knowledge about the city in question, and not vice versa. 2. This is to be distinguished from studies on measurement, modelling and simulations of urban sprawl, which undertook exactly the reverse project from urban growth pattern studies. They developed or calibrated a system of sprawl measurement and applied it to one or more cities as an example of its functioning. However, the measurement studies included in this review went beyond measurement to include sufficiently diverse data from other sources (historical, statistical, etc.) to constitute a case study. 3. Policy evaluation studies reviewed a policy already in place to evaluate its effectiveness. 4. Impact assessments evaluated environmental or socio-economic impacts of urban sprawl. 5. Institutional analyses looked at the functioning of government, corporate and nongovernmental groups to better understand the causes, characteristics, consequences and possible solutions to sprawl. 6. Transportation studies focused on land use and transportation connections. Urban Growth Patterns Economic and population growth are generally believed to be important drivers to urban sprawl, and assuming that they are necessary causes, it would be difficult to imagine a city in economic and demographic decline still with ongoing urban sprawl (Figure 2). However, this is exactly the case that has been documented in three separate case studies of sprawl in three different cities: Leipzig, Germany; Liverpool, UK; and Yazd, Iran (Couch et al., 2005; Nuissl and Rink, 2005; Shahraki et al., 2011). The resulting urban form in the three cases was marked by continuously declining densities in the city centres while sprawl continued unabated on the periphery. The abandoned buildings in the centre became dilapidated and were eventually demolished, creating a ‘perforated’ urban fabric. These demolitions reinforced the loss of city-centre population density, further detracting from its attractiveness as a living environment in comparison to the newly built suburbs. Nuissl explains that sprawl in Leipzig was openly encouraged as a sign of development and progress in the post-socialist city. The sudden influx of West-German investment into Leipzig led to massive promotion of peripheral housing property by government and media, whereas industrial location policies on the periphery further drove low-density development. The surprising find of sprawl in declining cities, in © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies 507 Urban Growth Patterns Measurement, Modelling, and Simulation Policy Evaluation Impact Assessment Institutional Analysis Transportation study 0 5 10 15 20 25 Fig. 2. Cases by themes as percentage of total. three different and separate cases, throws into serious doubt the assumption common in much of the literature that growth is a necessary prerequisite of urban sprawl and, in doing so, reveals that the causes and functioning of urban sprawl are still inadequately understood. Another surprising finding is that the number of case studies on urban sprawl from China is nearly as numerous as those from the USA, which is where interest in this topic first germinated. Furthermore, the gap between the percentage of studies on China (26%) and the country with the third most number of studies, India (7%), is quite large. This leads to the question: why is there so much interest in urban sprawl in China, where cities are generally both large and dense, not prototypical of sprawl? An answer may be found in China’s urbanisation rate, which has been very rapid over the last 30 years: The 2011 UN-Habitat Report shows that in 1978, 17.9% of the population was urbanised compared with 46.6% in 2009. While that rate may seem low compared with the present rate of urbanisation in the developed world, it must be considered that the period between 1983 and 1996 saw an unprecedentedly rapid rise in urbanisation: it is estimated that on average, 30 new cities were created per year during this period (Tao et al., 2011). Extremely rapid urbanisation and globalisation in China in fewer generations than most anywhere else may have profoundly marked the collective conscience and made a stark contrast between the lifestyles and memories of living generations, for example, between grandchildren and grandparents. Whereas the objective existence of sprawl does not depend on these things, interest in it may be accentuated because of exaggerated inter-generational differences in living conditions and expectations. The Chinese version of urban sprawl is recognised as different from that in North America, including a higher density. Zhang (2000) notes that the characteristics of Chinese sprawl include ‘the disproportionate expansion of the urbanised area’, per population expansion, and ‘scattered development in the urban fringe’, but excluding low-density commercial strip developments and central city decline associated with sprawl elsewhere (p. 128). Yaping and Min (2009) further specifies two aspects to urban sprawl in China: urban spill-over and local urban sprawl. The former are high-density peri-urban, single-function developments, well serviced by infrastructure and open space. The latter occur in townships and villages and are low-density areas with hybrid land use patterns, a lack of infrastructure and open space. These two development patterns ‘become increasingly intertwined, with formal urban constructions extending outward into rural areas, at the same time that non-agricultural developments are turning villages and towns into sprawling areas of “informal” urban construction.’ (p. 1041) Keeping in mind that urban spread and urban sprawl are sometimes confounded, researchers found an unprecedented rate of urban expansion and sprawl throughout China. For example, © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 508 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies urbanised area increased 47 times over 26 years in Shenzhen, 36 times over 24 years in Nanjing, 13 times over 35 years in Taipei and Guangzhou saw a loss of 30.2% arable land and forest cover over 14 years (Huang et al., 2009; Lv et al., 2010; Xu, 2007; Yu and Ng, 2007). A major turning point in land development patterns was the 1987 transfer of land-use rights in the form of land leasing from the State to individuals (Wu and Yeh, 1997). The determination of the Chinese government to move towards a market economy since 1991, along with massive foreign investment have driven the most rapid period of industrialisation and urbanisation, from 1993 to 2002. ‘Large cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, are changing from the concentric zone cities of the industrial age to the decentralised multi-nuclei cities of today. This change is also an indicator of the transition of Chinese cities to more post-industrial forms’ (Yu and Ng, 2007, p. 97) A somewhat similar pattern of diffusion and coalescence has been observed in Toronto (Tole, 2008) and liverpool (Couch and Karecha, 2006), however in those cases in-fill development was driven by government-initiated brownfield development policies.. In India, researchers observed an increase in urban land of about three times the population over a 25-year period in both Ajmer and Mangalore, and the development took place along major roads and in peripheral areas (Jat et al., 2008; Sudhira et al., 2004). The findings from Indian case studies consistently and clearly contradict the idea that developing-world cities are becoming more compact. For example, ‘in the case of Kolkata, though the city has shown a trend to compactness during 1991–2001, the recent and overall trend is towards dispersion, which is an indication of urban sprawl’ (Bhatta, 2009, p. 4740). An even higher rate of built-area-to-population increase was noted in Yazd, Iran, where the urban area increased more than 200% compared with a population increase of only 42% between 1987 and 2000. Illegal or unplanned settlement was mentioned as a major driver, and interstitial sprawl, or a city area ‘perforated’ with 38% dilapidated residences and urban farms, was added to the typical leapfrog and peripheral sprawl (Shahraki et al., 2011). Clear evidence of continuing urban sprawl across Asia, with the assurance of increasing population, urbanisation and wealth, means that urban sprawl and the study of urban growth dynamics in Asian cities remains of critical importance. Urban sprawl has been described as the most important process in Latin American urbanisation over the last decades. In Chile, it began between 1975 and 1983 when the government reduced its role as a regulating agent in favour of the private sector and foreign investment. The city of Los Angeles, Chile, is particular in that it witnessed a strange reversal of typical land-cover evolution when, driven by foreign investment, large areas of arable land were converted to forestry plantations, displacing the rural population to the periphery of the nearby city (Azocar et al., 2007). Latin American sprawl has been observed as a geographic expression of strong and continuing social polarisation, with the widespread presence of ex-urban upper-class gated communities, named parcelas de agrado in Chile or barrios cerrados in Argentina. Squatter settlements and illegal housing typify the lower-class version of sprawl or spread, while government subsidies allowed substantial real-estate expansion and dispersion for the middle and mid-low classes (Azocar et al., 2007; Morello et al., 2003). Thus, in Latin America, sprawl and urban growth is indelibly marked by class narrative and polarisation. Similar to Latin America and China, a greater opening to international markets through globalisation and Structural Adjustment Programmes in Africa has been associated with increasing peri-urban expansion. In a study of Accra, Ghana, the phenomenal urban expansion documented since 1986 was associated with, in addition to the above, a traditional triple system of land-tenure, cultural familial expectations, extended family networks, work abroad and conflicts between traditional and modern institutions (Yeboah, 2000). This reveals a very different set of variables behind urban growth dynamics in African cities, which remain largely unknown to the international urban research community. Rapidly increasing © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies 509 population, urbanisation and wealth in Sub-Saharan Africa, along with different cultural practices, land-tenure systems and institutions makes African cities critical objects of research for understanding urban growth dynamics and sprawl at a global scale. Sprawl Measurement Systems Another infamous difficulty in studying sprawl is the widely recognised lack of an acceptable measurement system, so much so, that Song in 2004 could state, ‘Although many have written about sprawl, few have sought to measure it.’ (p. 210). In answer to this gap, there has since been a flourishing literature in this area, which has been very fruitful in producing different types of measurement systems of increasing complexity and accuracy (Berling-Wolff and Wu, 2004; Deal and Schunk, 2004; Ewing et al., 2002; Frenkel & Ashkenazi, 2008; Jaeger et al., 2010; Lagarias, 2007; Torrens, 2008). After case studies on urban growth patterns, case studies demonstrating new systems of measurement, modelling and simulation represented the second-largest category (22%) among all case studies on urban sprawl. Concise reviews of systems for sprawl measurement, modelling and simulation are provided in Terzi and Kaya (2011), and Bhatta et al. (2010). By far, the most prevalent approach for measuring sprawl involved the use of remote-sensing or satellite imagery paired with GIS in calculating spatial statistics and effecting spatial analysis (Han et al., 2009; Jacquin et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2008). Land cover was the data most often used to assess the growth of urban areas, land-uses and densities. Landscape metrics have been developed on the basis of remote-sensing data to measure sprawl, and several different systems have been developed (Jaeger et al., 2010; Sudhira et al., 2004; Yu and Ng, 2007). Orthophotos have also been used in a somewhat similar manner, when, for various reasons, access to remote-sensing data was lacking (Hara et al., 2005; Robinson et al., 2005). Regression was used in 30% of the measurement-type case studies to evaluate the correlation between possible causes and the rate of urban sprawl (Batisani and Yarnal, 2009; Cheng and Masser, 2003; Hu and Lo, 2007). A technique with growing popularity is the use of fractal geometry to measure the degree of urban sprawl and examine a city’s growth over time. This recognises that ‘. . .urban patterns are highly complex, heterogeneous and hierarchically ordered revealing self-similarity across scales, numerous models of fractal analysis have been applied to the study of the urbanization processes’ (Lagarias, 2007, p. 2). Originally proposed by Michael Batty et al. (1994), fractal analysis acknowledges spatial complexity while arguing that the process of urban development is chaotic and ‘. . .can be defined as a complex structure and such complexity and be quantified through spatial patterns which show the irregularity of their configuration’ (Terzi and Kaya, 2011, p. 177). An increasing number of case studies, and 22% in total used some form of fractal measures to characterise sprawl. Cellular automata (CA) were used in 26% of the case studies to simulate urban growth (Barredo et al., 2004; Han et al., 2009; Yang et al., 2011). The simplicity of CA combined with their close connections to GIS and remote-sensing data make them very flexible for modelling potential sprawl. CA systems are both discrete and dynamic, on the basis of a grid in which each cell can be in one of a finite number of states. Every time the states are updated in a discrete time step, a cell’s state changes depending on local transition rules that depend on the current states of neighbouring cells. The urban growth models (UGMs) based on CA and used in urban sprawl case studies include Slope, Land-cover, Exclusion, Urbanisation, Transportation, Hillshade (SLEUTH); Land-Use Evolution and Impact Assessment Modelling (LEAM); and PHX-UGM. SLEUTH is a hybrid between two schools of CA modelling integrating both an UGM and detailed land-use data (Rafiee et al., 2009; Silva and Clarke, 2002). LEAM is used to predict the spatial extent of urban sprawl and the environmental © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 510 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies changes caused by it, as driven by the interaction of economic, ecological and social systems (Fang et al., 2005). The PHX-UGM is significantly modified version of Human-Induced Land Transformations Urban Growth Model, developed for San Francisco (Berling-Wolff and Wu, 2004). Shannon’s entropy (Hn) is an indicator and measure of sprawl, which was used in several case studies (Sudhira et al., 2004; Torrens, 2008). It measures the uncertainty of the realisation of a random variable, and in the case of sprawl, it measures the dispersion or concentration of a geophysical variable (Xi) spatially among units or zones (Jat et al., 2008: 28). Policy Evaluations Twenty percent of case studies evaluated policies aimed at limiting or managing urban sprawl, and of these studies, the majority (42%) evaluated urban containment policies, such as urban growth boundaries (UGBs) and greenbelts. These have the advantage of being conceptually simple and spatially oriented. Among the case studies reporting that the containment policy worked, the common factor seemed to be a shared ‘culture’ or appreciation among the local populace of the greenbelts’ or UGBs’ benefits. Portland’s famous UGB succeeded in creating a dual land market and placing major legal obstacles for development outside of the UGB. Its success is in large part due to a strong local ‘culture’ of sustainable development, which has a very wide base of support among the local population, and is associated with popular civil morality, whereby support of the UGB is widely seen as helping Portland to ‘grow smart’ and helping fellow citizens to ‘act right’ (p. 211). For this reason, Portlanders rejected an expansion of the UGB as proposed by the Portland Metro Council and have voted against efforts to abolish or weaken it four times. Moreover, its application across Metro Portland avoided typical problems associated with political fragmentation at the municipal level. (Abbott, 2002) Another study (Nelson and Moore, 1996) found that the UGB only worked in Portland, not in Oregon’s other towns, because ‘the more dominant urban areas are in regional development control policy-making, the more likely the region’s decisions will be consistent with statewide planning goals’ (p. 253). Similarly, Seoul’s greenbelt also succeeded because of both a strictly enforced policy and widely recognised social benefits, despite intensive leapfrogging enclosing the greenbelt and transforming it into a great urban park (Bengston and Youn, 2006). Of the urban containment policies that met with less success, the studies cited bad policy design, inflexible categorisations and exclusion of residents and key stakeholders from the planning process as major factors for their lack of success. In Seattle, the UGB itself may have played an unintentional role in encouraging development outside its boundaries through the policy of ‘downzoning’ or allowing low-density development outside of the UGB with the idea of minimising environmental impacts. However, from 1974 to 1998, suburban land outside the UGB increased 756% and exurban increased 193%, which was exactly contrary to the intended effect (Robinson et al., 2005). In Christchurch, New Zealand, amendments to the UGB to allow some development weakened the categories urban-vs-green in the minds of residents, which the UGB was supposed to represent, and who consequently developed outside of the UGB (Cadieux, 2008). Beijing’s greenbelt also failed because the plan was written without the participation of key stakeholders, particularly resident farmers, as well as an unrealistic forecast of urban growth (Yang and Jinxing, 2007). However, according to Zhao et al. (2009), the ‘decentralised-concentration’ growth management policy did work. It established ‘peripheral constellations’, which are urban nodes or planned edge cities, and succeeded in encouraging population and density increases. An effective economic measure of discouraging sprawl was the land tax or split-rate tax, which taxes land more dearly than the structures built on it, thereby lowering the © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies 511 capital/land ratio and in theory increasing the number of housing units per unit of land area. Economists Banzhaf and Lavery (2010) found that the adoption of the split-rate tax in Pennsylvania resulted in a 4–5% point increase per decade in housing unit density. Policies reviewed as ineffective included development impact fees for Phoenix (Heim, 2001), housing subsidies and federal transfers for Chicago (Wiewel et al., 2002), land reform programs in Beijing that were only partially implemented (Deng, 2004) and land-readjustment policies in Tokyo that promoted leapfrogging (Sorensen, 1999). Impact Assessments Nearly all of the case studies on the impacts of sprawl dealt with environmental impacts, and they were predictably and consistently found to be adverse. The study on Nanjing by Xu et al. (2007) showed that the best-quality soils tended to be built over first because of their proximity to the river delta on which the city was originally constructed. Thus, agricultural-to-urban was a more common land-cover change than forest-to-urban. However, urban sprawl also causes a loss of forest cover, as the amount of low-density residential land was found to be the most accurate predictor of forest cover change in New Jersey (MacDonald and Rudel, 2005). Flooding was identified as a major risk associated with urban sprawl, as surface sealing increases runoff and reduces the soil’s capacity to absorb excess precipitation (Haase and Nuissl, 2007). In Bangkok, where flooding was traditionally managed by a khlong system of irrigation canals, ponds and rice paddies, their conversion to residential uses reduced the area’s water storage capacity and represents an increased flood hazard (Hara et al., 2005). Interestingly, one area where urban sprawl locally improves an environmental variable is air pollution. Deridder et al. (2008), in simulating a sprawl scenario with according increases in vehicle kilometres travelled, emissions and pollutants, found that individuals who move to sprawling suburbs decrease their exposure to pollutants by 13%. This was counter-balanced, however, by an increase of exposure to pollutants of 1.2% for residents who remained in the city. Institutional Analyses There were two major themes brought up by case studies focusing on institutional analyses of urban sprawl. One was the presence or absence, the latitude of influence, or marge de manœuvre, which individual citizens can exert over the planning process, and its eventual impact on a compact or sprawling development pattern. The case studies demonstrated a wide range of possibilities, from the case where the individual citizen was nearly or entirely absent in the planning process (Guangzhou, Beijing), to cases where the process of development was led by developers and the City (Calgary), to cases where the process was citizen-led (Michigan). The other major theme was the role that decentralisation and conflicting government regulations play in perpetuating sprawl. A study of four Swiss towns (Mann, 2009) found that the municipal level was the most important for spatial development; however, this was also the level least concerned by environmental goals. In this pronounced case of decentralisation, despite national growth guidelines, there was little to prevent the local conversion of land to built areas, inside or outside of specified growth areas, a process that is highly profitable to landowners and municipalities. China offers another instance where dramatic decentralisation, in contrast to a centralised economy, has created much sprawl. One study (Zhang, 2000) identified the combination of market forces and the government’s reaction to those market forces as the main driver for sprawl. He also found that besides private interest groups, the public sector was broken into many ‘public’ interest groups that have different interests in growth management and © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 512 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies farmland preservation, and therefore cannot reach consensus, arrive at policies or hope to enforce them. These studies among others (Chorianopoulos et al., 2010; Jaret, 2002; Prud’homme and Nicot, 2004; Pütz, 2011; Samaruutel et al., 2010; Zhao et al., 2009) highlighted that increasing decentralisation, government fragmentation, conflicting government regulations and priorities, and inter-municipal competition play important roles in the institutional creation and perpetuation of sprawl. Another key problem to managing sprawl is the exclusion of stakeholders, in the form of individual citizens, resident farmers and peasants, from planning processes. In Guangzhou, the expropriation of peasant land at below-market price, in addition to entangled land use regulations riddled with contradictions at different jurisdictional levels, has made the management of urban sprawl practically impossible (Yaping and Min, 2009). In Beijing, stakeholders were not wealthy real-estate developers or industry barons but 880 000 farmers shut out by the greenbelt, and the author identified this action in particular as having caused the failure of the greenbelt policy initiative from the start (Yang and Jinxing, 2007). Although public participation is part of the Canadian planning process, Foran’s (2009) in-depth study of Calgary highlighted the City of Calgary and private developers as the two main forces in development. The City fostered the idea of the ‘uni-city concept’ which involved aggressive annexation of the surrounding townships, and developers also sought annexation to assure land inventories and maximise profits through access to easily serviced land at the lowest possible prices. The City did not show any interest in encouraging a variety of suburban housing designs, and the developers did not either, having ‘. . .realised from the outset in the 1950s that it was the idea of “one’s own house” which counted.’ Because their recipe generated profit, they had no reason to change it. ‘The City and the developers always maintained that the private sector route was cheaper, ultimately more efficient, and therefore beneficial to the homeowner.’ (p. 217) However, Foran points out that this argument is contestable because the price of housing does not diverge markedly from other major cities and prices appear determined by market demand rather than availability of land. In marked contrast to this case, Westphal (2001) presented a version of citizen-led development control resulting in clustered higher-density villages in an agricultural setting. This example of grassroots institutions recalls Portland’s ‘culture’ of sustainability in its singleminded focus on preserving the natural environment. In Peninsula Township, Michigan, one of largest agricultural producers went bankrupt in 1989, setting off a cycle of subdivision development in the predominantly agricultural area. Two citizens commissions were organised, the first to identify key issues affecting the quality of life, following which the Planning Commission proposed an Agricultural Preservation Plan. The second citizen’s commission promoted a tax funding the purchase of development rights as part of the Agricultural Preservation Plan, which was eventually approved by referendum. The citizen’s commissions were highly unusual to North American planning by providing the leadership in determining development goals, which were then facilitated by the Planning Commission who found the appropriate legal apparatus to follow those goals. Although it can be argued that such grassroots institutions function best in small villages, the example of a widespread citizen-supported ‘culture’ of growth management in a metropolis such as Portland demonstrates that popular action can also be effective in larger cities as well. Transportation Studies Transportation studies were the least popular type of urban sprawl case study, and the information they contributed about urban sprawl was not very promising. Bertaud and © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies 513 Richardson (2004) argue that changes in public transit supply in Atlanta will not affect spatial configuration and subsequent population density of large American metropolises and is therefore not a way of decreasing urban sprawl. In a similar vein, a study on Madrid (García-Palomares, 2010) demonstrated that low-density residential areas lead to higher vehicular modal shares, even in municipalities where there is an abundant supply of high-quality public transit. Beijing is also starting to face similar transportation dilemmas as Western cities, for faced with the triple process of marketisation, globalisation and decentralisation, ‘macro-scale development management with an emphasis on achieving macro-scale environmental goals might now face challenges from local development activities’ (Zhao, 2010, p. 242). The necessary mass transportation to accommodate dramatic urbanisation in Beijing is not implemented mainly because of local development interests and incapacity of local governments to manage rapid urban growth. Conclusion Some of the solutions proposed for urban sprawl included an increase in participative management and the fostering of grassroots institutions in the development process (Cadieux, 2008; Westphal, 2001) or ‘integrative management’ (Yang and Jinxing, 2007; Yaping and Min, 2009). Urban containment policies, economic disincentives to speculation such as split-rate taxes and land-banking were also found to be effective (Banzhaf, 2010; Foran, 2009; Robinson et al., 2005; Wiewel et al., 2002). In contrast, measures focusing on transportation were found to be ineffective (Bertaud & Richardson, 2004; García-Palomares, 2010). In developing countries, there was a general call for a higher institutional quality in more and better urban planning methods and tools (Huang et al., 2009; Kucukmehmetoglu and Geyman, 2009; Mandeli, 2008; Morello et al., 2003; Zhao, 2010). Whereas urban sprawl in China, India and Africa, according to the case studies, is driven by population increase, the same is not true of Europe and North America. In these places, urban sprawl continues at a sometimes alarming pace despite declines in the population growth rate and actual population and even in the face of economic decline as well. This indicates that urban sprawl is a characteristic growth pattern of contemporary cities worldwide, but with regional variations. Urban sprawl as a topic of research must therefore be addressed if global environmental concerns are to be satisfied, especially in the rapidly growing cities of Asia and Africa. The lacuna of research on African cities, in marked contrast to the scale and growth rates of their cities, marks them out as particular targets for future research. This also brings up the need for more comparative research, in particular that which is both in-depth and covers a variety of different national, institutional and cultural contexts, and includes cities from the both the global north and south. Short Biography Annette Stomp has a B.A. in anthropology and urban geography, and a Master of Urban Planning, both from McGill University in Canada. She is presently doing doctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL) on questions related to urban sprawl, especially in its comparative dimensions across cities, countries, and cultures. While touching upon institutions, individuals, environments, and transportation, her work is as focused upon the spatial variations of peripheral urban spaces as it is upon the underlying social, political, and economic issues. © 2013 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 7/7 (2013): 504–516, 10.1111/gec3.12043 514 An International Survey of Urban Sprawl Case Studies Notes * Correspondence address: Annette Stomp, Chôros Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected] 1 Definition from Yin (2009) “. . .an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident. 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