Contested Landscapes of Urban Sprawl: Landscape Protection and Regional Planning in Scania, Sweden, 1932–1947

Abstract

Studies in landscape and planning history are used here in order to critically examine the debate on urban sprawl and to reveal embedded conflicts within spatial planning aiming to curb sprawl. The paper aims to illustrate this with an examination of one of the earliest attempts to control peri-urban development at a regional level in Sweden. The discourse on sprawl is first introduced and the fruitfulness of landscape studies in capturing inherent and conflicting aims within planning is examined. Subsequent analysis of the seemingly scattered and weak spatial planning of the 1930s and 1940s in Scania, Sweden, reveals an ad hoc regional plan, developed primarily in order to curb scattered development. The importance of the landscape discourse for the development of the plan, as well as the contradictory treatment of urban sprawl (on a local and regional level), is demonstrated. The final part discusses the importance of this historiography for the ability to deal with the current planning situation. The conclusion is that urban sprawl is not necessarily the result of weak or absent planning, but rather of embedded contradictions within planning; therefore stronger planning will never be sufficient as long as the inherent conflicts within the plans (and in the landscape they help create) remain unresolved.