Abstract
The urban sprawl phenomenon has attracted the attention of social researchers since the mid-20th century. It seemed that all relevant aspects had been extensively studied and that it would be difficult to produce new studies with significant contributions. However, in the last decade, we have witnessed a revival of the literature on urban sprawl for three main reasons: (i) the existence of new methodologies to measure the phenomenon based on digital cartography and geo-referenced information, (ii) new hypotheses about the relevance of the formation of metropolitan areas not institutionally integrated into urban sprawl in many places and, mainly, (iii) the role of urban density in the environmental sustainability of cities. The recent literature on this third aspect has grown the most and around which it seems that new and interesting lines of future research will develop. The objective of this work is to present a synthetic review of the most recent literature on urban sprawl as of the end of the second decade of the XXI century. This review can serve to recapitulate the growing consensus that is being formed on the lower environmental sustainability of low-density cities and diffuse limits.
Highlights
Cities allow us to work, create, have fun, and express ourselves together while sharing urban spaces
The phenomenon of urban sprawl has always attracted the attention of urban planners, geographers, urban economists or sociologists
In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of the scientific literature on urban sprawl
Summary
Cities allow us to work, create, have fun, and express ourselves together while sharing urban spaces. It is understood that urban sprawl is a physical phenomenon of the dispersion of buildings and expansion of the space occupied by the city and a phenomenon that encompasses different disciplines: geography, urban planning, environmental analysis, economics, sociology and even policy science [3]. The central city plays a structuring role mainly in relation to the labour flows in higher skilled and trained occupations, see Usach and others [24] The complexity of these processes must be considered in the formulation of public policies designed to mitigate the unwanted impacts of the dispersion, while the sub-centres of employment are consolidated to articulate metropolitan dynamics
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