thesis of urban sprawl

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Characteristics, Causes, and Effects of Sprawl: A Literature Review

This article is a literature review of the definition and effects of urban sprawl for the purpose of implementing planning policies that discourage sprawl.

Key findings

“Sprawl is defined in terms of “undesirable” land-use patterns—whether scattered development, leapfrog development (a type of scattered development that assumes a monocentric city), strip or ribbon development, or continuous low-density development.”

“It is the impacts of development that render development patterns desirable or undesirable, not the patterns themselves.”

“Sprawl might be characterized generically as any development pattern with poor accessibility among related land uses. Poor accessibility may result from a failure to concentrate development and/or to mix land uses.”

“Some of the hallmarks of sprawl are apparently to the public’s liking. By a margin of 66 to 34 percent, people favor ‘homogeneous neighborhoods’ over ‘mixed neighborhoods where different types and sizes of houses are in the same general area and where small stores and other commercial activities are nearby.’”

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Defining urban growth: a meta-synthesis of studies

• Published: 24 August 2024
• Volume 89 , article number  194 , ( 2024 )

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• Hashem Dadashpoor   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2914-3668 1 &
• Kiana Etemadi 1  

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Understanding urban growth as a vital phenomenon in the rapidly changing environments of today's world is essential for urban and regional planners. However, this concept is not clearly defined, and providing a definite definition of it has rarely been focused on the related literature. In this article, the existing definitions were categorized into three groups using the meta-synthesis method to reach a definition of urban growth. Keep in mind, that concepts such as urbanization, urban expansion, and urban sprawl employed instead of urban growth or used interchangeably with it have been investigated and concluded that these terms are some modes of urban growth, and they are defined under this term. Then, a comprehensive framework was introduced for defining urban growth, consisting of four dimensions: occurrence time, process type, occurrence scale, and resulting changes. Each dimension has some components, which respectively refer to the states in which urban growth occurs, processes of coalescence and diffusion, the scale of the emerging growth, and the effects of urban growth. The proposed framework in this article includes the components of the previous definitions and defines urban growth as a physical, demographic, and economic process. It also provides a suitable groundwork for scholars to better understand of the concept of urban growth.

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Recent literature about urban sprawl: a renewed relevance of the phenomenon from the perspective of environmental sustainability.

1. Introduction

2. revision of the definition of urban sprawl motivated by the development of new techniques for its measurement, 3. recent contributions on the identification of the causes of urban sprawl: policy also matters, 4. consequences of urban sprawl: the renewed relevance of the topic from the perspective of urban sustainability, 5. conclusions and policy implications, author contributions, conflicts of interest.

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Rubiera-Morollón, F.; Garrido-Yserte, R. Recent Literature about Urban Sprawl: A Renewed Relevance of the Phenomenon from the Perspective of Environmental Sustainability. Sustainability 2020 , 12 , 6551. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166551

Rubiera-Morollón F, Garrido-Yserte R. Recent Literature about Urban Sprawl: A Renewed Relevance of the Phenomenon from the Perspective of Environmental Sustainability. Sustainability . 2020; 12(16):6551. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166551

Rubiera-Morollón, Fernando, and Ruben Garrido-Yserte. 2020. "Recent Literature about Urban Sprawl: A Renewed Relevance of the Phenomenon from the Perspective of Environmental Sustainability" Sustainability 12, no. 16: 6551. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166551

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