Is Europe Sprawling?

The United States is known for its sprawl, but what about Europe? Cities in Europe are sprawling, but differently than U.S. cities. How so? And what can they do about it?

Resources on this topic:

- Clifton, Kelly, et al. "Quantitative analysis of urban form: a multidisciplinary review." Journal of Urbanism 1.1 (2008): 17-45.

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[nasifsiddiquey]

It's funny hearing people say that "suburbs keep you closer to nature" while suburban sprawl is what gets rid of greenbelts, which literally keep people in cities close to nature.

[quiet]

"Sprawl" is a funny word when you hear it ~20 times in quick succession.

[SourDisc]

The UK definitely seems to be sprawling, my town is building numerous single use suburban areas on the outskirts with barely anything but single family homes. this is attracting a whole lot more car traffic since (this may surprise you) our public transit system is literally crumbling. nothing near american levels but still.

[oligultonn]

Here in Iceland the Capital Region has already sprawled almost to it's limits. To the west we have giant lava fields that are expensive and time consuming to flatten. To our south and south east we almost reached the place where we get our water from the ground and beyond that are lava fields where this groundwater enters. To our east it's the same story with water and also mountains. To our north and north-west is the sea. Our capital Reykjavík now has a policy of "densification" or making the city more densely populated.

[iehgovm]

No matter where you live in the world we must protect farms, woods, wildlife, etc, etc, etc

[thomasbergfeld]

The problem of Urban sprawling is that low density area very expensive to maintain. It gets expensive 40-60 years after the initial construction, when you need to replace streets, sewer, power and communications lines. Compact medium to high density cities have a better tax income to expense ratio. So, these can be sustainable. In the US a lot of low-density counties have to expand, to get cash from selling new single-family homes, to pay to repair the older areas. You can only do this Ponzi scheme, as long as the cities keep growing.

[paupadros]

Most major European metro area are ammalgamations of older towns, which have a density of their own. The Barcelona graph is interesting, because right at the 18km mark there are a group of historic cities with their own independent growth, which, over time have ended up in the Greater Barcelona area. The scarcity of land forced towns to merge in a dense manner than in America, where there is endless land pretty much.

[mdhazeldine]

I live in the UK (near London) on greenbelt land. There is a golf course opposite my house and a developer is proposing to build 200 houses on it because as the golf course was built, it is now technically "brownfield". Sprawl sometimes happens in Europe, despite greenbelts because developers are really good at finding loopholes in laws. Governments need to look at and try to close loopholes like this if they want to prevent sprawl.

[firenter]

Belgian here and I am not surprised we're topping this list. Back during the building boom lots of land near connecting roads between towns got parceled up for individual homes instead of getting larger plots of land to create neighbourhoods. This created something I'm going to translate as "ribbon sprawl" where you get long ribbons of single family homes that make it impossible to see where one town ends and another begins.

[BYROXI]

In France, this problem is know as "périurbanisation" (peri-urbanization).
This is a well documented development and a problem for the past 40 years, and because of a law in 2021 that ask for no more artificialization of soil but to have the part of the artificialization constant (like you can destroy a building and build another in another place but with the same surface of concrete), the cities are renovating every single building instead of building new ones.

So this fixed the sprawling of cities everywhere (but some mayors didn't know about it and did go to court) but can be a burden in prices both for cities and for the people because the demand for more housing is growing faster then the construction.

PS: The law is "Climat et résilience" (climate and resilience) of 22 august 2021, with the objective of pure neutral concreting by 2050 (but they want results very fast)
Edit: typo

[NateHatch]

What’s so crazy about places like Los Angeles is that they FEEL and function more crowded than far denser places like Paris because of the sheer volume taken up by every person’s car.

[KyleJMitchell]

"Amsterdam is basically Houston, confirmed" sure _feels_ like a troll targeted at Not Just Bikes, but I'm just not certain.

[purplebrick]

Hi, german urban planning student here!
I thought I might share some instruments we use to counteract sprawl.

"Double priority for internal development":
In §1 of the Federal German Contruction law (BauGB), you find what concerns you should especially weigh against each other when making decisions about land use.
Among those with priority, you find the protection of nature, climate and animals. Further §1a was added some years back, which reinforces that land is to be used sparingly and with care. Infill and brownfield development take priority.

Now comes the clue: for every m² you build on, you have to protect an equivalent m² of nature within your constituency. This leads to problems for constituencies without much surrounding land, but those are beinf ironed out. Sadly they made it so you can just compensate with money instead of land now, because nobody had any green land left. But this means that lots of green space is protected as a compensation-area for prior construction activity.

"EU circular land economy 2050"
Does what it says in the title. If states dont reduce their land taking to basically a net zero until then, there will be heavy fines. Fines are scary. Germanys current goal is to get the land taking of unbuilt-on land to under 30ha/day, we're doing "eh" at that currently.

"Innenbereich vs. Außenbereich"
Every constituency is made up of an "inner area" and "outer area". The inner area is whats built up "in junction", the outer area is the rest. What you can build there is regulated by seperate paragraphs, allowing you to build next to nothing in the outer area except for solar and wind power plus agricultural facilities.

If you want to make outer area into inner area, you need a B-Plan (Build plan). This doesnt make it impossible to build single family homes on greenfield sites, but it imposes significant hurdles because a B-Plan has to be done by at least a planning bureau, or the local administration. And its subject to the weighing process from §1 BauGB. The most significant hurdle is that thr process can take some time and money and you cant just throw up a house, and another one, and another one...

As i said, all this doesnt mean that bad decisions arent made. But in comparison with for example switzerland, germany sprawls less id say (based on observation).

In addition, we have significant federal funding programs for things like renovation, remodeling and reconstruction (Städtebauförderung). Its genuinely a very very good program, maybe you could take a look at it, maybe even a video?

[bbukkegayo]

2:20 the paper uses a logarithmic transformation in their density model....it's comparing the *ratio* (density in a "metro" from the center to some distance away) rather than *absolute* densities between different metros. Their model is illustrating how to measure "sprawl" which is what it shows (a linear regression between density and distance from the city center - which has relationships with travel behavior, etc), but it doesn't really illustrate any absolute density metrics.

I think 😅

In other words, I'm not sure it's correct to say that their model shows "Barcelona is denser at its center than LA, " but it shows that there's a smaller share of Barcelona's metro population per 1km from the city center as compared to LA and NYC. Put another way: it's weighting for distance.

NYC is extremely dense. It has 42% of its respective metro area population. Barcelona's share is about 24%. However, this doesn't account for the differences in the size of both administrative subdivisions. Barcelona is smaller in area than NYC and I presume it's Metro area is as well.

This doesn't show density; it shows sprawl. Something like gridded, average density calculations (there are plenty of models you can google and look at) are similar and more useful for what you're attempting to show here, I think.

It sounds semantic - and again, I'm not sure I fully understand their methodology. I just often struggle with "density" being used as a proxy for "sprawl." Density in general is a bad metric, because it's not normalized to any standard thing (i.e. your unit of analysis can vary wildly). The authors want to show the relationship between where people live in a metro area; however, I would like to see how they account for the wildly varying sizes of these units. It could be they're exaggerating these differences, which is what I suspect.

[pietervoogt]

If you lived in Rome (I also did it for 2 months) you are forever changed, you just can't accept that cities have to be ugly, it is just so very obvious it can be different. I also like their solution for medium height density further from the center, not so much boulevards or streets as in Paris or Amsterdam but 'palazzi, ' medium sized apartment blocks with space for green in between.

[jean-martinvonsiebenthal]

Sprawl has been a big concern here in Switzerland since the 70s, leading to various measures to protect prime farm land and the countryside character of periurban villages. Already back then policy makers were wary of the country turning into a single megalopolis akin to the Japanese one.
Despite the implementation of many conservatory measures, the very high immigration led population growth is causing much sprawl in the dynamic urban areas and their periphery, with small villages coalescing into the cities, and 2nd and 3rd tier cities converting into residential suburbs for the main center.
Since we entered Schengen area in 2008, at the same time the EU countries were hit by the financial crisis, we went from 7.4 to 9 Million inhabitants (purely immigration driven, natural growth would otherwise be negative). The dynamic for the country is probably more akin to that of a major metropolis than anything else, due to the relatively compact size of the country, and the dense transit network making the railways more and more comparable to a subway network.

We do have a good example of leapfrog development, which is in part due to regional and crossborder political differences : Geneva has a strong City-State identity from before joining the Confederation, with a dense inner city surrounded by its own countryside greenbelt, which it is intent on preserving. But as at the same time it is now a World-class metropolis with a very dynamic economy, much of its workforce is pushed to live in surrounding France, and/or in the closest 1st, 2nd and 3rd tier Swiss cities accessible via train or motorway. Basel probably shares some similarities, counpounded by it being a City historically divorced from its countryside, and sitting at a triple border, drawing commuters from both France and Germany.

As a side note, a more extreme and interesting phenomenon is the use of HSR like TGV in France, converting distant 2nd tier cities into extensions of the Capital, the best example being Bordeaux, almost 600 km away from Paris, but only 2h away center to center since the inauguration of the line in 2017, which is competitive enough for people to consider moving there while holding a job in Paris.

[harenterberge]

Dutch suburbs are still fairly dense and consist mainly of two story (+attic) row houses. In the US you would call this 'the missing middle'.

[fernbedek]

Canada sometimes does leapfrog development, when our greenbelts are too thin. *cough* Ottawa *cough*

[CrushedFemur]

GIS is so valuable. Most jobs in archaeology now encourage you to have a GIS certificate or experience at least.

[Arjay]

Leapfrog development doesn't make much sense in Europe because people want to live in the city/town where they are at and once you go to a leapfrog development you are essentially in a different place that's not really emotionally connected to the city/town that you came from. It gets it's own identity and community. Heck I have people living 30 minutes by bike from me (7-9 KM) that wouldn't feel connected to my city/town at all. My neighborhood is part of the actual city and while those people 30 minutes away might still come to "my" city for all the big things, they don't consider themself part of this city.

Then add in that every neighborhood/town/city in Europe has most everything you would need to live if you were to live in a leapfrog development there would be no reason for you to do anything in the city apart from the very rare events, but in those cases it would be no different than going to a distant city for a event/daytrip. So once you leapfrog you lose most connections to the initial city/town, so at that point you might as well just build a new city/town to stand on it's own instead of a few homes to serve the initial city/town.