ancient cities

awareness that it is happening and a tendency by
some to regard it in a more relaxed manner.
In some of the recent research the development of
sprawl is traced in different periods throughout history
and especially in the twentieth century. From the
early days of sprawl through the postwar boom years
to the sprawl condition of today, we have been witnessing
often controversial causes of sprawl, different
antisprawl campaigns initiated, and different remedies
brought into play to counteract the development.
It is convincingly argued and explained why
most of these campaigns and remedies do not work.
A useful tool for visualizing the effects of sprawl
on the urban development is the density gradient.
Residential or employment density of an urban area
is recorded along the vertical axis as population per
square mile or kilometer, while distance from the
city center in miles or kilometers is marked on the
horizontal axis. If we take for instance London
1801 as a starting point, we get a very steep graph
falling from the left to the right indicating a rather
dense city center, quickly transforming to a distinct
periphery only a few miles away from the center.
Over the years London, as well as most other cities,
has lost population in the center and has grown
enormously in the periphery, producing a much flatter
graph. This density gradient tends to become
flatter for all urban areas, unless, of course, we are
dealing with urban territories with a natural boundary
(e.g., Hong Kong). Even Los Angeles is denser
than New York if the urban territory is taken as a
whole. Paris is like London: At least three-fourths of
the population of the 10 million that live in the
urban territory of Paris in the region Île-de-France,
live outside the beltway (le périphérique). A job
count confirms the tendency. During the 1990s the
city of Paris lost 200,000 jobs, whereas the outer
suburban area gained 160,000 jobs. By the end of
the twentieth century it was obvious that a generalized
urban sprawl had rendered the old distinctions
between urban and rural obsolete in many areas of
the world and created a diffuse mode of life founded
on mobility and the single-family house.
It is pointed out that the density gradient tends to
become flatter the more affluent the society becomes.
The tendency to seek residence in the open countryside
has always been the case as affluence rises in
any given society. Where citizens become more
affluent and enjoy basic economic and political
rights, more people have access to the advantages
that earlier were reserved for wealthier citizens.
Sprawl
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The new thing about the actual situation in the
urban territories is that privacy (the ability to control
one’s own surroundings), mobility (meaning
both personal and social mobility), and choice
(understood as the multichoice lifestyle, available
to even the most humble middle-class family) has
now turned into a mass phenomenon. This is made
possible by individual ownership of cars and the
increasing buildup of infrastructure, making mobility
one of the most important aspects in the urban
territory of today and making landscape an inseparable
part of the urban territory.
Landscape and the Built Environment
In the 1970s and 1980s, when the reconstruction of
the city was the main focus, there was a tendency
to define the European city as something dense and
fundamentally different from, for instance, the
American city, which was regarded as something
much more dispersed.
A closer look at the European urban reality
today, based as it is on network cities and mobility,
indicates a kind of abolition of some of the
more fundamental dichotomies that used to form
the basis of the traditional urban concept: first and
foremost the dichotomy between city and landscape
but also the ones between center and periphery,
public and private, and so on. Traditionally
the development of urban issues related only to
one side of these dichotomies, but something seems
to indicate that the opposition between them is no
longer valid. What if central urban issues are now
equally present on both sides? And what if this,
more than anything else, is the specific character of
the urban condition?
According to recent research, dispersion has
been a persistent feature in cities since the beginning
of urban history. As cities have become more
economically mature and prosperous, they have
tended to spread outward at decreasing densities.
The only new thing about this in the twentieth century
is that it is becoming more visible as it appears
as a mass phenomenon—all cities are now exploding.
This decrease in density in affluent cities is
perhaps the single most important fact about recent
urban development. This is the case everywhere.
Sprawl can be seen outside all of the big Asian,
Latin American, and African cities. In practically
all metropolitan areas in the world, the periphery
share of the population in the urban territory has