ancient cities

766 Sprawl
and economic stability (1998 Kuala Lumpur
Commonwealth Games), and technological superiority
(1998 Seoul Olympic Games); as sites for the
demonstration of national unity in the face of
disruption following the events of September 11,
2001 (Yankee Stadium, Olympic Park for the 2002
Salt Lake City Games, and the New Orleans Super
Dome during the 2002 National Football League
Super Bowl); and in the dramatic reconstitution of
a city’s skyline (the new Wembley Stadium, whose
arch, the longest single-span roof structure in the
world, dominates the London skyline).
Michael Silk
See also Architecture; Placemaking; Urban Planning
Further Readings
Baade, Robert A. and Richard F. Dye. 2006. “The Impact
of Stadium and Professional Sports on Metropolitan
Area Development.” Growth and Change 21:1–14.
Bouw, Matthjis and Michelle Provoost, eds. 2000. The
Stadium: Architecture of Mass Sport. Rotterdam,
Netherlands: NAi Publishers.
Delaney, Kevin J. and Rick Eckstein. 2003. Public Dollars,
Private Stadiums: The Battle over Building Sports
Stadiums. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Paramio, Juan Luis, Babatunde Buraimo, and Carlos
Campos. 2008. “From Modern to Postmodern: The
Development of Football Stadia in Europe.” Sport in
Society 11:517–34.
Riess, S. A. 1995. Sport and Industrial America.
Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson.
Ritzer, G. and T. Stillman. 2001. “The Postmodern Ballpark
as a Leisure Setting: Enchantment and Simulated
DeMcDonaldization.” Leisure Sciences 23:99–113.
Roche, M. 2000. Mega-events and Modernity. Olympics
and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London:
Routledge.
Sheard, Rod and Robert Powell. 2005. The Stadium:
Architecture for the New Global Culture. Balmain,
Australia: Pesaro.
Sp r a w l
Sprawl is usually described as rapid, unplanned,
or at least uncoordinated, scattered, low-density,
automobile-dependent growth at the edge of or in
the urban periphery. As such it is not an analytical
concept. The concept is hardly operational, meaning
something different at different periods for
different users of the concept. Mostly it is regarded
as a sort of critical concept, useful in suggesting an
attitude rather than indicating any actual conditions,
an almost always negative attitude. Without
being a genuine strategic concept, it is a concept
calling on action, calling on strategies against
sprawl. In a substantial part of the urban studies
literature it is used as a concept with programmatic
ambitions, about stopping the development
of sprawl by strategies emphasizing the dispersion
as well as the dynamics of the urban area.
Some claim that it was not until the beginning
of the 1960s that sprawl—as the occupation of
previously uninhabited landscape—became an
issue in the urban discourse, and it was for a
long time regarded as being a uniquely American
phenomenon based on the fact that in America
there was plenty of cheap land on which to build
single-family dream houses and an abundance of
cars and roads by which to get there. Today it is
more or less obvious that sprawl is a universal
phenomenon, a new form of urbanism that inevitably
becomes dominant when technological infrastructure
concerning mobility and communication
is established at a regional scale.
Sprawl is a convenient concept. Sprawl is never
totally the same, as the form of its urban design or
(lack of it) is continually changing. The low density
as well as the dynamic in its spreading out are
constantly subject to criticism regarding sustainability
as well as questions concerning social segregation,
indicating that the well-known dense form
of urbanity is supposed to be both more sustainable
and less segregated.
Dense and Dispersed Urban Territory
But in many ways, the existence of the dense and
dispersed city and urban territory is not a new
thing. It has been developing for a number of
years, but the development has intensified dramatically
during the last couple of decades. A relatively
small number of people now live in the old
and denser parts of the cities, the rest (the majority)
in a dispersed urban territory, bound together
by infrastructure and not by continuity of urban
form. The new thing is perhaps the growing