Barcelona Metropolis

It would be a misconception to think that there is no system in the recklessness of sprawl. It certainly does have forms and patterns and its own logic. Anyone who says sprawl is formless probably means to say it has urban forms they do not like. In the thinking of many city-minded people, urban sprawl occupies a comparable place as the suburbs it has mostly overtaken. Just as we consider suburbs – if its prefix is taken literally – to be urban (at best), sprawl is rarely seen as truly urban either.

Sprawl and suburb are different animals, though. First of all, there is a difference in appreciation. A significant share of the population seems to genuinely like suburban lifestyles and would neither want to live in the middle of the city nor in the middle of nowhere. By contrast, nobody appears to long for living in a sprawling environment. In addition, there is – or perhaps I should say: was – a clearly identifiable idea behind the concept of suburb, even if not all suburban developments are a successful reflection of it. Like the original model of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city, the suburb, ideally, was meant to combine the advantages of both the city and the countryside.

However, sprawl is urbanisation devoid of a clear idea. Or maybe it is better to say: devoid of one clear idea. Sprawl is the net result of many different ideas, the inadvertent but unavoidable outcome of hundreds, thousands of individual, contradictory, sometimes even irreconcilable decisions. It is kind of urban but not like a traditional city, it may have a suburban density but is very different from the emblematic residential landscapes of identical detached houses, with neat front lawns, and double and triple garages. And more fundamentally, whereas suburbs are the dependents of cities – for work, leisure, culture –, sprawl does not need a city per se. Even if it sounds tautological, sprawl just needs space to sprawl, and it is not just the one-directional process of urban dilution, but in line with Rosenberg’s prescient observation, also can entail agricultural concentration.

Grid cell densities
Enter Eurostat statistics, which refrain from using the term sprawl. Like in almost any other field, European bureaucrats have a fascinating detached view of what the urbanised territory could entail. For them it starts with the degree of urbanisation, or DEGURBA, one of many acronyms of the European Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques (which has its own acronym as well, NUTS). They use three basic categories: urban, rural and intermediate density, the latter officially labelled as “town and suburb”. While the urban form of a town differs fundamentally from that of a suburb, from the statistical point of view, they are both simply places of intermediate density, where “less than 50% of the population lives in rural grid cells and less than 50% of the population lives in urban centres”.[6]

The grid cell is another marvellous example of Euro-bureaucratic detachment. Irrespective of topography, culture and national borders, Europe is divided into cells of one square kilometre, for which the degree of urbanisation has been established. Of course, it is not as simple as that. Urbanity requires a “high-density cluster” of grid cells: with a density of at least 1,500 inhabitants per square kilometre and a total population of at least 50,000 inhabitants. Similarly, towns and suburbs require one-square-kilometre grid cells each with at least 300 people and adding up to a minimum total of 5,000 inhabitants. Everything below this threshold is rural, unless nobody is living in a square at all, when it is for instance natural landscape, or industry, harbour, airport or any kind of infrastructure.

Following the logic of the population density grids, in 2021, 38.9 percent of European Union (EU) citizens were living in a city, 25.2 percent in rural areas and 35.9 percent in towns and suburbs.[7]

Venn diagram
Density and grid clusters are only one side of the story. Eurostat also looks at Functional Urban Areas (FUAs), the amalgamation of urban centres – of 50,000 or more inhabitants – and their commuting zones, which qualify as such if at least 15% of the population is commuting to work. The FUAs show how pervasive European urbanisation is, with around 800 cities across the EU, home to 40% of the population, surrounded by nebulas of commuting zones, home to another 20%.[8]

But the FUAs do not reveal anything about their urban form, which often cannot be reduced to Eurostat’s ternary grid cells, which are either urban, suburban or rural (or void). For instance, just more than half of the Netherlands consists of agricultural land (54%). However, functional urban areas cover approximately 70% of the country’s territory. This means that, in a Venn diagram of the country’s land use, around 30% of the Dutch territory is simultaneously urban or suburban, and rural. This land of mostly urban sprawl and rural scatter is not the often-idealised countryside of tranquil, simple living close to nature. Rather, it is home to people, staggering numbers of animals for human consumption, a highly polluting agro industry, but also to a range of activities such as industrial plants, solar farms and distribution centres.

Push and pull
While it is an idée reçue that North America is the biggest sprawler, the contradictory reality places Europe as the true leader in this regard. The European Environmental Agency concluded in its 2006 Urban Sprawl in Europe report, based on data from the Monitoring Land Use Dynamics project (MOLAND), that “historical trends, since the mid‑1950s, show that European cities have expanded on average by 78%, whereas the population has grown by only 33%. A major consequence of this trend is that these cities have become much less compact. The dense enclosed quarters of the compact city have been replaced by free-standing apartment blocks, semi-detached and detached houses”.[9] The report continues with: “In half of the urban areas studied in the MOLAND project, more than 90% of all residential areas built after the mid‑1950s were low-density areas, with less than 80% of the land surface covered by buildings, roads and other structures”.[10]

Recent research by Martin Behnisch, Tobias Krüger and Jochen Jaeger underscores this dispersion, finding that overall urban sprawl had increased globally by almost 100% in 25 years from 1990 to 2014, and most strikingly that “urban sprawl at the continental scale in 2014 was higher in Europe than in North America”.[11] Breaking it down by region, the most sprawling parts of the world are Western Europe, Southern Europe and Northern Europe. Northern America is fourth, directly followed by Eastern Europe.

Europe is increasingly defined by a double tendency of urban push and rural pull. The net result of which is a range of urban and rural phenomena that play out at the edges of towns and cities, continue in the neighbouring suburbs, affect the surrounding periphery, determine the peri-urban and exurban and transform agricultural land. This blurscape may be disliked by many; its urban forms might defy any conventional categorisation, but it is certainly here to stay.

References