ancient cities

768 Sprawl
increased considerably. According to the U.S.
Census Bureau, 50 percent of the U.S. population is
living in the urban territory outside the city cores
while less than 30 percent lives within the city core.
In Europe, Berlin is the only metropolitan area with
a decrease in periphery share (probably due to its
situation during the cold war). In all other European
cities, including Rome, Paris, London, Randstad,
Copenhagen, and Stockholm, the number of people
living in the periphery is increasing.
If we argue that landscape as a common feature
no longer can be regarded as something opposite
to, or a kind of antithesis to the city, then it must
be seen as an integrated part of the total urban territory,
and therefore has to be considered a central
part of urban and architectural planning.
Asked directly, most people will say that they
prefer to live in close connection to urban centers
in open, landscape-like surroundings, with multiple
lifestyle choices and mobility connections. The
apparent conflict of these preferences necessarily
leads to a continuous reformulation of the relations
between city and landscape, leading to an
unavoidable increase in mobility, primarily in the
form of growth in private car usage.
The processes of urban mutations reformulate
the built environment and the landscape into new
urban territories. New concepts like network city,
the city without limits, and “ruburbia” and “rurban
life” suggest that former, more or less unambiguous
concepts like city, town center, suburb,
periphery, farmland, and open landscape are not
alone in the field anymore. Some have chosen to
call this new European condition “after-sprawl.”
They emphasize the new conditions by renaming
them, and they also attempt to change focus from
the built space and infrastructure to the so-called
negative space (the new valuable agricultural,
green, and water spaces) to combat negative associations
with the word sprawl. Where most of the
former investigations still are based on the understanding
of the built space as more or less independent
unities emerging in an empty space, this
perspective is turned upside down in the aftersprawl
study. One could also say that perspective
is left to make it possible to see reality in totality
without hierarchical structures. No intellectual
picture is produced in advance. The empty space
or the void is not regarded as negative from the
beginning. It is no longer background for figures in
the foreground as it was in the modernist urbanite
models. This is a way of thinking that results in a
totally different visual and mental picture. It is an
attempt to introduce an unprejudiced way of seeing
that no longer takes its starting point in a given
rational, established pattern of expectations from
the outside, but rather in recognition of the given
situation.
A smaller change in one part of an urban region
could have ripple effects almost anywhere else, so
trying to understand the reciprocal relationships
between sprawl, inner city, suburb, and exurb
would be like trying to solve complicated mazes
simply by looking at them, knowing that in this
case there is no privileged entry or exit in the networked
urban territory.
One consequence of this fact is that landscape
as a concept and metaphor, as an understanding
of something “artificial,” has been used as one of
the most productive starting points for formulation
of models for development and transformation
of the urban territories in the past few years.
One could claim also that sprawl, as other
parts of the urban territory, is folding out as a
manifold, fragmented, and heterogeneous picture.
It is impossible to determine sprawl unambiguously
and homogeneously both in relation to a city
core and building typology as well as concerning
social, economic, or ethnic questions. Urban sprawl
is also a patchwork of different forms of urban
design and architecture from different times, located
next to one another, interacting or overlaying one
another. All together many things indicate that
sprawl as a phenomenon in the urban territory is
here to stay.
Morten Daugaard
See also Edge City; Gated Community; Homeowners
Associations; Metropolitan Region; New Urbanism;
Suburbanization
Further Readings
Bölling, Lars and Thomas Sieverts, eds. 2004. Mitten am
Rand. Auf dem Weg von der Vorstadt über die
Zwischenstadt zur regionalen Stadtlandschaft.
Zwischenstadt Band 1. Dortmund, Germany: Verlag
Müller + Busmann KG.
Bormann, Oliver, Michael Koch, Astrid Schmeing,
Martin Schröder, and Alex Wall. 2005. Zwischen