Which model inspired by sprawl shows the central city now surrounded by suburban space?

Abstract

The term urban sprawl has been used to describe low-density automobile-oriented settlement patterns with little comprehensive public planning. Opponents of this kind of settlement pattern claim that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally damaging, and aesthetically ugly. They have called for more planning, growth restrictions, growth boundaries, greenbelts, open space conservation, environmental laws, historic preservation, and other mechanisms to promote many of the compact, transit-oriented cities. Other observers suggest that the problems with sprawl have been overrated and the efforts to stop it are likely to be ineffectual or to backfire.

5.5.5.7 Sprawl

The rise of urban sprawl during the 20th century created continuous pressures on county lands that besides eliminating productive agricultural land, created peculiar living conditions that consumed land, increased commuting distances, pollution, infrastructure costs, traffic jams, needs for more and bigger roads, reduction of housing options, reduction of route options, elimination of biking or walking as a means of transportation, and a decrease in the richness of the urban environment available to the community. Sprawl is a main feature in many counties that border cities. Since infrastructure layouts are lengthier and densities lower, technology investments will have to sprawl over larger distances, thus possibly increasing the number of sensors required, installation and maintenance travels, while due to lower densities, devices may service fewer people. It is an area with little available research but smart growth in relation to smartification is a very relevant topic for counties that need further investigation. Sprawl pressure, for example, may constitute obsolete already installed sensors and smart technology in areas taken over by new subdivision developments. County Departments to address such issues will be Community Development/Planning, Transportation, Public Works, Economic Development, along with County Clerk, County Treasurer, Board of Supervisors, and Commissioners offices.

6.7 Sprawl: the link with speed

Increased speeds feed urban sprawl, or the ‘dispersed city’ (Montgomery, 2013 p. 46). As explained in Chapter 3, when speeds increase, the time that transport economists expect to be saved (and hence include in their cost-benefit modelling) is rarely saved. Instead, the increased speed is used to buy more distance, which is often linked to people moving to residences further from the city. A city where ‘slow’ transport modes are prioritised encourages the development of denser, better connected neighbourhoods. The impact of this is evident in the lower combined housing and transport costs in these neighbourhoods (Chapter 7), compared with that in sprawling outer suburbs, and also in the much lower greenhouse gas emissions. The explanation for these differences rests not only in the regular commutes made by residents, but also in the land-use and lifestyles of adults and children in different areas of the city. In sprawling suburbs, consisting of low-density dispersed single-family houses (see Fig. 2.5), not only is the land area per house block greater, there is a greater need for more paved streets and roads, more expansive drainage systems, greater demand for water pipes, power cables, utility wiring, sewerage and other services than in denser, more walkable neighbourhoods.

Sprawling cities are also more vulnerable to global heating. The rate of increase in annual extreme heat events in the most sprawling cities in the United States between 1956 and 2005 was more than twice the rate of increase in the most compact cities (Stone, Hess, & Frumkin, 2010). Sprawling suburbs also require more support with school transport, including school buses. In the United States alone, more than 25 million children have to be bussed to school. The energy and greenhouse gas implications of these school trips would be negligible if children were able to walk or cycle to local schools.

Low-density sprawl is usually linked to a planning strategy based on the large-scale segregation of different types of land use. Residential areas are separated from commercial districts, retail parks, office parks and industrial parks, all with their own supply of paved surface car parks, and connected by high-speed roads. Not only do residents in sprawling communities spend long hours commuting, but even the trip to the gym, the closest supermarket or mall often necessitates driving at speed. Speed enables the creation of dispersed cities, and once established, the dispersed land uses force the citizens of this landscape to maintain their reliance on high-speed transport to access their destinations.

Sprawled landscapes also have a further indirect effect on energy use through the increase in consumerism associated with low-density living. More consumer items are required in low-density environments facilitated by high-speed transport, including lawnmowers, more outdoor furniture, air-conditioning and heating, landscaping, and of course, cars (sometimes several per household). In so-called ‘lifestyle blocks’ still further out from the city, families ‘play’ at being weekend farmers, with the whole gamut of devices such as quad bikes, mini-tractors, pickup trucks, and utility vehicles, plus a range of recreational vehicles such as campervans, moto-cross bikes, motor boats, jet-skis and snow-mobiles. Whilst this may seem positive for economic growth, these extreme levels of consumerism also require high levels of energy use, currently dominated by fossil fuel energy.

1.1 Utopian urbanism

Dreaming about the future of cities and conceiving new visionary schemes for improving the sustainability of urban development has a long tradition. In these schemes, the deficiencies of the present translate into stimuli for shaping alternative urban systems in which a new set of rules and standards, that society is expected to adhere to, become the assurance of an improved sustainability. However, despite being built on a genuine intent to improve the human condition, some of these alternative solutions have resulted in urban utopias: unrealistically perfect spatial imaginaries whose highly symbolic rendering of the future is flawed due to the tendency for the visions that they embody to be based on stereotypical ideas misrepresenting reality.

One of the first utopias was created in Ancient Greece, when Plato introduced his totalitarian philosophy of the city. Plato images cities as economic independent and self-sufficient entities in which the community is divided into three classes. For Plato, discipline, perfect obedience, and control over each single member of community are the key components of a perfect society, and they can be secured by combining stringent authority and coercion. As Mumford explains in his analysis of historical utopias, this Greek utopia stands on principles that relate to an historical era whereby survival is based on the capacity that society has to be prepared for war (Mumford, 1922, 1965).

Following Plato’s urban imaginary, a significant amount of utopian thinking has emerged in which the stringent authority and coercion have been replaced with less militaristic set of principles. For example, Thomas More’s Utopia, a fictional island society in the New World, represents one of the most famous spatial imaginaries produced so far. Conceived in the framework of the urban challenges affecting England in the early 16th century, Utopia manifests itself as a future state of affairs that stands in opposition to war, oppression, and injustice, by proposing a new social structure based on common ownership (Goodey, 1970; Wilde, 2017). Utopia’s ambition to end social inequalities is also shared by Edward Bellamy and the blueprint of the perfect society that he introduces in Looking Backward: 2000–1887. In his vision, which is conceived 300 years after Utopia, Bellamy portrays the stresses of the 19th century industrial society of the United States, that is, violent class conflicts, the end of the frontier and antiimmigrant xenophobia, the labor movement, poor working conditions, poverty, and hunger. The solution that Bellamy offers is for society to replace the competitive economic system with a utopia that promotes universal employment and total equality (Bellamy, 1888).

Utopian visions of the future city can also be found into the work of some of the most influential modern architects and planners, who provided an invaluable contribution to urban development theory and practice. For example, the English town planner Ebenezer Howard is known for initiating the garden city movement. Shaped in the idea of progress and as a reaction to the overpopulation, inequalities, and pollution of industrial cities, garden cities were intended as new compact towns surrounded by rolling green belts and populated by self-contained and self-sufficient communities. These new towns were expected to grow outside large metropolitan agglomerations, on large areas of agricultural land, and to combine the desirable features of both the city and the countryside. Howard believed this connection between urban and rural would have set the ground for a new civilization and more sustainable urban planning policies and improved living arrangements capable of ending urban poverty (Howard, 1898).

Howard’s utopian thinking was greatly influenced by Looking Backward, and his work represents an attempt to put forward a practical approach for testing Bellamy’s utopian conceptions of future cities in a real-world setting (Howard, 1965; MacFadyen, 1970). However, the garden city experiments failed to meet the expectations. Research by Sharifi (2016) and Hügel (2017) demonstrates that garden cities have proved unsuccessful in building self-sufficient communities and addressing the needs of low-wage workers. In addition, their financial model, which was unsuitable to attract the investments of the banking sector, forced Howard to accept the trade-off between equitable development on the one hand and market support on the other hand (Williamson et al., 2002; Gillette, 2010; Edwards, 1914; Falk, 2017).

Despite its limitations, the essence of the garden city movement has maintained an enduring influence and produced long-lasting effects that still resonate in urban development studies (Hardy, 1992). The principles embedded in the garden city idea have become an inspirational source for colonial planning in sub-Saharan Africa and new residential areas in Brazil (Bigon, 2013; Rego, 2014). Yeo (2019) describes the cross agency initiatives that are contributing to introduce the garden city idea into the high-density urban context of Singapore, whose environmental policy exposes its ambition to become a model green city (Han, 2017). Hou (2018) reports on the outcomes of the “Garden City Initiative” that the city government of Taipei has launched to expand urban gardens, exposing the connection between the garden city movement and urban planning practice in Taiwan. The garden city movement has also influenced the Scottish housing reform and town planning practice of the 20th century, leading to significant changes in the approach to construction of working-class housing developments (Rosenburg, 2016). In addition, there is also evidence of a new garden city idea whose functionality has been recently tested out in York and Oxford. This 21st century version of the garden city builds on Howard’s ideology and is proposed as a possible solution to the housing crisis affecting the United Kingdom (Falk, 2017).

The deep preoccupation for the future of cities and civilization that stimulates Howard’s utopian thinking is also shared by Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. As Fishman (1977: 12) states in his presentation of the ideal cities pictured by these three visionary urban planners, all of them “hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion” and the urban environments in which they were living represented “the hell that inspired their heavens.” The unrealized masterplan of the Ville Radiouse (Radiant City), designed by Le Corbusier in the 1920s, encompasses his utopian vision of the future city. The Radiant City is created by following the modernist understanding of tradition, which is perceived as a barrier to progress, and suggests building a new generation of urban environments on the ashes of 19th-century cities. According to Le Corbusier, nothing could solve the inefficiencies of cities and their unsustainable development patterns but demolishing and rebuilding cities infused with strict order, symmetry, and standardization. These are the main features of the Radiant City, which rises from a regular layout and a highly organized zoning system composed of the following parallel areas: satellite towns for hosting special functions, such as government buildings; the business center; railroad station and air terminal; hotels and embassies; housing areas segregated by income, which are split between middle-class apartments in monolithic skyscrapers for luxury high-density living arrangements and six-story buildings and modest accommodations for lower-income residents; factories; warehouses; and heavy industry (Hall, 1988). In addition, in the Radiant City, all the areas are connected through an intricate network of high-speed traffic roads and parking lots exposing an autocentric design that was expected to satisfy both the needs of a fast-emerging modern transport system and the never-ending obsession of the Swiss-French modernist architect for automobiles (Jacobs, 1961), the same obsession that inspired his architectural work (Amado, 2011). As Le Corbusier explains in his manifesto for modern architecture, the mass-production principles and standardized manufacturing process of the automotive industry should have been considered as an inspiration for the construction sector. In his vision, building houses by applying the same level of standardization was the only way to reach a new spirit, whose elevated aesthetic of perfection would in turn lead to the rebirth of architecture (Le Corbusier, 1986).

The standardization and strict order that Le Corbusier suggests are also the driving forces behind his utopian view of modern cities and society that is supposed to live such spaces. As Le Corbusier explains while describing his plan and idea of modern city planning, “the city of today is dying because it is not constructed geometrically. To build on a clear site is to replace the accidental layout of the ground, the only one that exists today, by the formal layout. Otherwise nothing can save us. And the consequence of geometrical plans is repetition and mass-production. And as a consequence of repetition, the standard is created, and so perfection” (Le Corbusier, 1987: 220).

Chandigarh, the capital city of the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, gives a tangible form to the utopian vision that the Radiant City stands for. Immediately after the British voluntarily granted India its independence, India and Pakistan became two different geographic entities. As a consequence of the partition, Punjab was split into two independent countries, and this division left the Indian Punjab without a capital city. Rather than granting the status of capital to an existing city, the prime minister of the Indian Punjab decided to authorize the construction of Chandigarh, a new city that was expected to embody the faith of the nation in a new beginning. In the 1950s, a team of modern architects that included Le Corbusier, his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew was invited to implement the master plan for Chandigarh, a master plan that the American architect and planner Albert Mayer was commissioned to oversee the design of. However, instead of collaborating in giving expression to Mayer’s plan, which was already approved, Le Corbusier took the leadership and used this opportunity to test his strict zoning system and idea of a perfect form of urbanism on a greenfield site (Chalana, 2015; Chalana and Sprague, 2013; Fitting, 2002; Hall, 1988; Prakash, 2002).

The in-depth examination of the Chandigarh experience conducted by Hall (1988) and Sarin (1982) in the 1980s, which pictures the city as an incubator of poverty and injustice, uncovers the limitations of the utopian vision proposed by Le Corbusier. This vision has been harshly criticized for being affected by a “profound misunderstanding of human nature” (Fitting, 2002: 80) and a lack of concern for the lifestyle habits of people (Jacobs, 1961), who were expected to accept an imposed one-size-fits-all design that was nothing but incapable of meeting everyone’s needs (Hall, 1988). The failure lays in the monumental dimension of an unrealistic vision, which has proved to be distant from the citizens of Chandigarh, and also the strong belief of Le Corbusier in the triumph of industrial standardization and mass-production methods in the architecture of future cities (Fitting, 2002; Hall, 1988; Jacobs, 1961; Mumford, 1961).

Fixing the modern city by using a new code was also the ambition of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Broadacre City, his utopian vision of a decentralized urbanity. With Broadacre City, Wright attempts to reconcile the progressive power of technological development with the magnificence of nature, two forces that have been drastically separated in the cities of the industrial age. Wright believed that modern technologies were offering society with the opportunity to escape the pitfalls of the industrial city and to embrace improved living arrangements hosted in rural lower-density settlements surrounded by the beauty of nature but without renouncing urban conveniences. In this vision, Broadacre City was conceived as the means for reestablishing the symbiotic relationship between human beings and natural environment (Wright, 1931, 1932), a relationship that Howard, Le Corbusier, and Wright all considered fundamental for individual fulfillment and societal progress.

Wright started conceiving Broadacre City in the 1924, and his vision aligns with some of the philosophical principles underlying the garden city vision proposed by Howard. Wright’s utopian thinking shares the same: “rejection of the big city (and high population density), the same populist antipathy to finance capital and landlordism, the same anarchist rejection of big government, the same reliance on the liberating effects of new technologies, and the same belief in the homesteading principle and the return to the land” (Hall, 1988: 312). However, unlike Howard, Wright does not want the countryside to absorb the life of cities to facilitate community planning, but to give every citizen a place for living as free individuals (Wright, 1932).

As Levine (2008: XI) describes, Broadacre City was meant “to offer all the advantages of modern technology without any of the disadvantages of the urban congestion and blight that many recognized at the time as a major consequence of modernity.” Wright envisions a democratized society “that would be technologically advanced in practice but agrarian in organization and values” (Shaw, 2009: IV), where each family is assigned an acre, that is, the democratic minimum of land. In addition, this vision for a sustainable urban future was also meant to become the antithesis of what Wright considered as “the superficial suggestions of the machine-made utopia” (Levine, 2008: I) of Le Corbusier and the total loss in human culture this utopia was leading to (Wright, 1931), by imposing verticalization and “the tyranny of the skyscraper” (Wright, 1943: 323).

Unlike Le Corbusier, Wright never had the opportunity to build Broadacre City. However, the fast-expanding trend toward exurbanization, which the United States started registering in the 1940s, caused the massive move that Wright was dreaming about. Cities were gradually depopulating in favor of the countryside, where decentralized forms of communities began growing. Year by year, Wright’s utopian vision was becoming reality (Hall, 1988), but rather than producing the beneficial transformations that he was strongly believing in, this trend made it possible to expose the limitations of the visionary scheme driving his “experiment in civilization” (Wright, 1932: 29).

The 1940s was a period in which the growth in the demand for and supply of rural residential developments began acting as a force of change in the urban development dynamics of North American countries (Davis et al., 1994; Dueker et al., 1983; Nelson, 1990, 1992, 1995; Newburn and Berck, 2006). This change has generated exurbanization, a process of urban sprawl that “occurs when people move from central cities and suburbs into the countryside” (Davis et al., 1994: 45), and it resulted in a new low-density and noncontiguous form of urbanization that has irreversibly modified the North American rural landscape. Nelson and Dueker (1990: 93) estimated that during the period between 1960 and 1985, “exurban counties accounted for nearly a third of the share of continental US growth,” and they also expanded “faster than all other counties in both nominal and share-of-growth terms.”

This migration pattern from urban to rural was triggered by a combination of multiple factors. On the one hand, there are socioeconomic and political conditions. The living arrangements offered by suburban and urban areas were unsustainable, especially when seeking for affordable real estate (Sutton et al., 2006), and the urban policy promoted by the federal government was undoubtedly favoring “new construction over rehabilitation or reuse of buildings, highways over public transit, converting open space to urban uses over leaving it alone, construction of single-family (owner occupied) over multiple-family (renter) housing, growing areas over depressed ones, and new locations over old ones” (Nelson and Dueker, 1990: 91). On the other hand, new telecommunication technologies (radio, telephone, and telegraph) and modern mobility, combined with the advent of flextime, decentralized working, and manageable commuting costs, were offering the possibility to benefit of urban conveniences but from the natural setting of rural areas (Nelson and Dueker, 1989).

Over the last five decades, urban sprawl has drastically changed land-use dynamics and the spatial distribution of population in US countries, and it has generated a number of sustainability challenges affecting the agrarian landscape. A large number of new rural developments have resulted from this decentralization process in which the land consumed per unit of housing is higher than urban and suburban developments (Nelson, 1992; Newburn and Berck, 2006; Heimlich and Anderson, 2001; Theobald, 2001; Sutton et al., 2006; Nelson and Dueker, 1989). This phenomenon has caused a high level of land fragmentation that is found responsible for:

altering natural habitats by disrupting wildlife, hydrologic systems, energy flows, and biodiversity (Alberti and Marzluff, 2004; Dale et al., 2005; Chalfoun et al., 2002; Grimm et al., 2008; Hansen et al., 2005; Newburn and Berck, 2006; Merenlender et al., 2009);

decreasing agricultural and forest productivity (Hasse and Lathrop, 2003; Carsjens and van der Knaap, 2002);

increasing the costs for public service provision and the overinvestment in the construction of transport infrastructure (Brueckner, 2000; Hasse and Lathrop, 2003; Zhao, 2010; Kunstler, 1993);

the disappearance of culturally relevant open spaces and natural amenities (Deller et al., 2001; Schipper, 2008; Swensen and Jerpåsen, 2008).

What is more, among the negative externalities documented over the years in relation to sprawl dynamics, Frumkin (2002), Ewing et al. (2003) and Lopez (2004) have also included the adverse impacts on public health. Their research demonstrates that “the adverse impacts of sprawl do not fall equally across the population” (Frumkin, 2002: 212), but residents of sprawling areas tend to exercise less, weigh more, and have greater prevalence of hypertension than residents of compact urban areas (Lopez, 2004; Ewing et al., 2003).

Once again, this demonstrates that sustainable urban development, which utopian visionaries like Wright, Howard, and Le Corbusier were so passionately trying to reach, cannot materialize through simplistic sets of universal rules and standards, because they will always fall short of understanding the complexity of urban life. No perfect code or design for cities exists that can remedy all societal problems, improve the human condition, and instill the fundamental principles of sustainability and democracy that modern society seems to have partially lost over the years. For as many commenters suggest, approaching sustainable urban development by using autocratic and top-down visionary schemes can produce nothing but the illusion of a universal panacea for urban problems (Mumford, 1956; Grabow, 1977; Hollands, 2015; Jones, 1966; Sassen, 1991).

Density and Car Dependence

In cities across the world the issue of urban sprawl is firmly on the agenda. Associated with it are the issues of density and levels of car dependence, and hence traffic. In the USA in 1998, 240 local governments had antisprawl initiatives on their ballots, and reductions in traffic had become a top priority across the country. However, debate among planners on these issues shows little sign of resolution.

The divide continues to widen between those advocating more compact cities and transit-oriented reurbanization (e.g., Cervero, 1999; Whitelegg, 1993; Roseland, 1998; Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Calthorpe, 1993; Elkin et al., 1991), and those advocating reduced densities and only technological changes to cars (e.g., Gordon and Richardson, 1989; Troy, 1996; Wachs and Crawford, 1991; Johnson, 1993). Another category of planners sit on the density/car dependence fence (e.g., Haughton and Hunter, 1994), while others see the problems but tend to avoid the planning implications in low density, car-dependent planning (e.g., Leitmann, 1999; World Bank, 1996; Stren et al., 1992).

The data on density and car dependence is very clear. All cities appear to lie on the negative exponential curve of density and gasoline per capita (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999). The same relationship is seen across cities, so that as density increases, per capita energy goes down, well beyond any income factors, for example, Manhattan uses 500% less energy per capita than the outer suburbs of New York. The mechanism is understood easily in terms of the relative ability to use different modes as distances between land uses spread out. It suggests that density is a powerful determinant of gasoline use, and hence if cities are to develop sustainably they should be facilitating reurbanization rather than new fringe development. Other planning studies have also shown over many decades the link between low urban density and a range of environmental problems (RERC, 1974; Berry et al., 1974).

Despite this kind of evidence there is a long tradition of planners seeing density as a problem (Newman and Kenworthy, 1989). Those planners advocating the benefits of sprawl who are associated with land or automobile lobbies can be discounted in debates about urban sustainability (STPP, 1994). However, there are many environmental planners who also adopt the benefits of low-density planning (e.g., Gordon, 1990; Todd and Tukel, 1981; Coates, 1981). This suggests that there may be a deeper issue in this debate; an issue that also lies behind the question of city size and sustainability.

Radberg (1995), when reviewing the form of cities required to achieve sustainability, described the rationale for a more compact city which can conserve energy. He then set out the form of a city for achieving green objectives that are ‘related to the ecological perspective’ for ‘recycling and cultivation’; this city is ‘greener, more ruralized, more spread out.’ He therefore raised the questions: Is there a conflict between the low-energy city and the green city? Is there a fundamental conflict between the need to have more urban land for the green city in order to do local ecological processing, and a low-energy city with its need to minimize travel distances and hence have a frugal use of land?

The resolution of this issue as suggested by Radberg (1995) was to enable some parts of cities to be developed more intensely for reductions in energy, and other parts to be more reduced in their density so that ‘greener’ activities could occur there. The evidence, however, is that those planners who support the reduction of density are not able to accept that any density increases are worthwhile (e.g., Troy, 1996). On the other hand, studies of urban ecology innovations by Scheurer (1999), confirmed by Beatley (2000), found that there are no increases in ecological activity in low-density areas. Indeed, the best examples of urban ecology (recycling, solar design, storm water retention, permaculture …) occurred in denser developments, mostly in inner city areas where communities were able to create innovative experiments, or in intentional rural or urban-fringe communities. In the car-dependent suburbs urban ecology innovations are rare.

Newman and Kenworthy (1999) tried to resolve the issue of density and the green city. They suggest that green innovations can indeed occur anywhere in a city, although experiments may best be applied in rural areas, especially in places where rural population decline is occurring. However, the broader global sustainability agenda cannot be subsumed by this new rationale for density-lowering; cities need to reurbanize while conducting simultaneous improvements in urban ecology. They suggest that the difference in attitude between the two groups is as much due to confusion over where different approaches to sustainability should be employed. In simple terms, the city should be allowed to become more urban, and the countryside more rural, if the multiple goals of planning and sustainability are to be met.

A resolution of this issue may not occur while people still use the word ‘sustainable’ to describe extensions of low-density, car-based development (even if designed with New Urbanist principles). The strong emphasis on reductions in energy that is now associated with sustainability will probably mean that car-based development increasingly will have to be described using other words that are less demanding of their global contribution.

14.3 Principles behind transport equity

As discussed earlier, especially in the context of urban sprawl, the provision of public transport services has been seen to have broad impacts on an individuals’ quality of life, and some populations are more likely to suffer from the consequences of a lack of adequate public transport options. Equity issues are thus inherent to land use and transport planning, and more specifically, to the provision of public transport services. Although transport planning agencies are increasingly concerned with such issues (Golub & Martens, 2014; Manaugh, Badami, & El-Geneidy, 2015), there is a lack of guidance on how to define and assess equity in the distribution of transport investments across a metropolitan region (Golub & Martens, 2014; Lucas & Jones, 2012; Pereira, Schwanen, & Banister, 2017).

Two questions arise when attempting to define and measure transport equity, as discussed by Pereira et al. (2017). The first one relates to what should be measured to evaluate the quality of the service provided from a social perspective. The second one is concerned with what constitutes a fair distribution of the service in a region. In this section, these two questions are briefly discussed before addressing, in the next section, the specific indicators and approaches used to evaluate equity in public transport services.

In recent years, transport researchers have reviewed various theories of justice to discuss the distribution of benefits and burdens of transport systems. With respect to the question of what should be measured, researchers draw from Rawls’ theory of justice and argue that accessibility, broadly understood as the level of access to opportunities, should be considered to assess the distribution of benefits provided by transport systems (Lucas, van Wee, & Maat, 2016; Martens, 2016; Martens, Golub, & Robinson, 2012; Pereira et al., 2017; van Wee & Geurs, 2011). In other words, the literature suggests that transport planners and policy-makers wishing to consider equity in the distribution of transport benefits should be primarily concerned with the level of accessibility provided to individuals (see also Chapter 3). This is in line with the empirical studies discussed in the previous section which have shown the importance of public transport accessibility for social inclusion. The notion of accessibility is especially relevant as it links the provision of transport services and infrastructures with the urban form in which they are implemented (see also Chapter 2).

With respect to what should be considered a fair distribution of services, researchers build on egalitarian and sufficientarianism theories to derive two principles of justice. The first is that a sufficient or basic level of accessibility should be provided to all individuals (Lucas et al., 2016; Martens, 2016; van Wee & Geurs, 2011). In the context of land use and transport planning, Preston and Rajé (2007) argue the lack of access to opportunities, rather than the lack of opportunities, is of concern. Overall, researchers tend to agree that a minimum level of accessibility to some key destinations should be ensured, and that this threshold should be defined to allow individuals to meet their basic needs and participate in society. This is far from being a simple task, as is discussed in the next section.

The second principle of justice discussed in the context of transport refers to the equality of distribution. Although this could suggest that the benefits of transport systems should be equally distributed to all individuals, researchers emphasize that what matters is equality of opportunities. Since individuals inevitably have unequal opportunities in a society, given internal and external constraints, egalitarian theories suggest that an unequal distribution of transport benefits should be considered to minimize inequality of opportunities (Martens, 2016; Pereira et al., 2017). It is argued that individuals more likely to have limited opportunities due to financial, cultural, physical, situational (e.g., lack of access to information), or cognitive constraints should be provided with higher levels of accessibility (Lucas et al., 2016; Martens, 2016; Pereira et al., 2017). More specifically, researchers refer to the maximin principle, suggesting that policies should maximize the level of access of the worst-off (Lucas et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2017). In addition to the maximin principle, Martens et al. (2012) argue that a maximum gap in access levels should also be taken into account.

In sum, there is an agreement that a fair distribution of transport benefits should consider the distribution of access to opportunities. Furthermore the principles of justice highlighted by transport researchers suggest that (1) a minimum level of access should be provided to all individuals, and (2) the level of access of disadvantaged populations should be maximized relative to the rest of the population to foster equity of opportunities.

Urban Sprawl and Decentralization

Dispersion and decentralization had a substantial impact on contemporary urban forms. Urban sprawl has been dominant in North America since the end of World War II, where land was abundant, transportation costs were low, and where the economy had become dominated by tertiary and quaternary activities. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising to find that there is a strong negative relationship between urban density and automobile use. In the context of cities with high automobile dependency, their built-up areas have grown at a faster rate than have their populations. In addition, commuting became relatively inexpensive compared with land costs, so households had an incentive to buy lower-priced housing at the urban periphery. Wherever there is motorization, a pattern of sprawl takes shape.

Although transportation systems and travel patterns have changed considerably over time, one enduring feature remains that most people are willing to travel between 30 and 40 min in one direction. Globally, people are spending about 1.2 h per day commuting, wherever commuting takes place in a low- or a high-mobility setting. Different transport technologies, however, are associated with different travel speeds and capacity. As a result, cities that rely primarily on nonmotorized transport tend to be more compact than are automobile-dependent cities. Transport technology thus plays a very important role in defining urban form and the spatial pattern of various activities. Still, the evolution of the urban form is path dependent, implying that the current spatial structure is obviously the outcome of past developments, but that those developments were strongly related to local conditions involving the setting, physical constraints, and investments in transportation infrastructures and modes.

20.2 Urban structure and land use

Los Angeles has always been regarded as a typical case of suburbanization and urban sprawl, and is the most representative city with disorderly urban sprawl and car-dominated transportation in the United States. With the development of its population and social economy, the urban area of Los Angeles has greatly expanded. Before 1900, the urban area of Los Angeles changed very slowly, but between 1900 and 1940, the urban area increased more than 10-fold. In 1915, San Fernando Valley was incorporated into Los Angeles, which increased the urban area by 440 km2.

The geographical span of Los Angeles Metropolitan Area is more than 100 km in east–west and north–south directions. Less than 6% of the city’s population is employed in downtown Los Angeles. As a result, the importance of downtown Los Angeles is relatively low compared with other cities of the same size in the United States. In Los Angeles, there are about 10 subcenters in addition to the city center. Outside Los Angeles, there are 16 cities with populations of more than 100,000, and 29 cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000. Therefore, the multicenter, low-density, and horizontal urban spatial structure of Los Angeles is very obvious, and is in sharp contrast with the single-center, high-density, and vertical urban spatial structure of New York.

Its urban sprawl makes Los Angeles continue to expand to its surrounding suburbs, and urban residents gradually move from urban residential areas (mainly apartments) to single villas in the suburbs, far away from the city center. The density of land use is declining, as residents move far away from their work place and have to use private cars to travel to work. As a result, urban traffic is highly dependent on cars, causing air pollution (including particulate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions), traffic jams, and high energy consumption. Los Angeles’s current traffic structure and problems are closely related to its unlimited urban sprawl. Fig. 20.1 shows a panoramic view of Los Angeles.

The Planning System in the United Kingdom

The Town and Country Planning Act (1947) set the basic framework for controlling development in the United Kingdom, one which has remained largely unchanged ever since. Hall et al. (1973) in their landmark publication The Containment of Urban England critiqued the 1947 town planning system at some length – they looked at England, but the systems in Wales and Scotland are very similar. They concluded that the English planning system was dominated by antidevelopment rural interests, with the effect that urban growth was contained, to the detriment of the majority of the population of England who – as a result – live at higher densities and pay higher housing costs.

Green belts have frequently been used around British cities to both limit the urban sprawl and to protect rural land – initially for the purpose of increasing agricultural output after the Second World War. Now this limit is in place, as much as it was earlier, for the countryside’s ‘own sake’. Hall et al. argued, however, that this was only one of the two core elements of the 1947 Act – alongside this limitation of urban growth, there was to be the ongoing creation of new towns, to accommodate the growing population of the United Kingdom. Some new towns were built in the 1950s and 1960s, but nowhere near the scale needed to meet the additional need or demand for new housing. Hence the planning system had merely, according to Hall et al., ensured the following developments:

The suburbs were pushed further away from city centres than would have been the case if the system had not been in place, as development ‘leapfrogged’ green belts.

Housing densities in the urban areas increased.

House prices were driven up owing to a scarcity of supply in the more desirable areas.

Hall et al. concluded that the less well-off – principally those who aspired to live in the countryside, but could not, owing to a lack of affordable housing – and those living in high-density urban dwellings had paid the price for this ‘containment of urban England’. They found that existing propertied rural inhabitants had been the overwhelming beneficiaries of the system – they continued to enjoy an undisturbed countryside and found the values of their land and property assets increasing at a rate significantly higher than if more development had been allowed.

UGBs and Housing Supply

The history of UGBs can be traced back to ideas about the containment of urban sprawl. They were suggested by Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement around 1900 and were implemented in the Greater London Plan of 1944. This plan used a greenbelt to place a boundary around London’s urban development. UGBs are usually managed by a single government planning agency. If the area affected by the boundary includes multiple jurisdictions, a special authority may be created by the state or regional government to manage the boundary.

There is significant controversy over whether UGBs influence housing supply and price. The type of UGB influences housing supply. They may be hard-edged as in the European model with a clear line separating the urban from the rural or soft-edged as in the American model where there is a transitional area of mixed urban and rural uses. Different governance models apply to UGBs. Some are enforced by legislation, and others through the purchase or transfer of development rights on adjoining rural land, or by land purchase outside UGBs, or by planning or building rules. UGBs may be flexible, aimed at growth management, or inflexible, aimed at protection of nonurban land from urbanisation, or a combination of both. Growth management aims to achieve orderly land release and often to increase both development within the existing metropolitan area and public transport use. The Portland, Oregon, UGB is an example of a flexible or managed UGB; the urban boundaries associated with the greenbelts of many UK cities are examples of inflexible UGBs.

If the area within the UGB does not include enough land, the cost of residential and other development can be driven up or development can be forced to other nearby communities. If the boundary contains too much land, it will not be an effective tool for achieving community goals, including growth management. Research into the impacts of regulatory measures such as UGBs on housing supply and price, has produced variable results that are inconclusive. Many empirical studies find little or no relationship between regulation, housing supply, and price. General conclusions applicable to all cities cannot be drawn from research because of differing urban circumstances. Differences in international city types and conditions, governance, transport systems, and land supplies pose serious challenges for researchers aiming to identify and measure the strength of causal relationships. Studies on conditions applying in US cities, for example, with depressed inner urban and expanding outer urban areas, cannot be easily applied to other city types, such as networked cities or those with thriving inner-city areas characterised by high-density redevelopment. UGBs affect low-density outer urban areas with limited greenfield land differently from compact cities, which maintain adequate land supplies through metropolitan intensification. Methodological differences also help explain variable results; because many interconnected factors potentially affect land supply and price, researchers have used different techniques to disentangle their relative impacts. A general consensus on the merits of alternative methodological approaches has yet to be reached.