Urban sprawl - making problems or providing solutions ?

the KL city, the CBD
source from www.skycrapercity.com

I was inspired by the posts on planetizen while I was searching for a topic. The Urban Sprawl was one of the top 10 planning issues in 2002 according to Planetizen. In many countries in the world, urban sprawl has always been a problem especially for countries with rapid growth of the city and many poor migrant from the countryside to the city. Effects to be able to live in cities, migrants have to work even as informal workers, and on the other hand, the need for enforcement of regulations  for the city manager, the urban sprawl that should be organized in accordance with the plan. The question is whether urban sprawl is currently running with good management or not? Does the plan will be sustainable and benefit the future generation? Does urban sprawling become a way to solve the problems of the increasing population, the development needs of a city etc. or it is making more problems ? In this blog, I'm going to discussing and sharing about these questions above on urban sprawl with taking cases of cities in Malaysia. 

• How to define Urban Sprawl ? 

One of the earliest uses of the word "sprawl" in terms of land use was in a 1937 speech by Earle Draper, then director of planning for the Tennessee Valley Authority: "Perhaps diffusion is too kind of word ... In bursting its bounds, the city actually sprawled and made the countryside ugly ..., uneconomic in terms of services and doubtful social value."


 "Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a multifaceted concept, which includes the spreading outwards of a city and its suburbs to its outskirts to low-density and auto-dependent development on rural land, high segregation of uses (e.g. stores and residential), and various design features that encourage car dependency."  SprawlCity.org


"Urban sprawl is generally defined as the increased development of land in suburban and rural areas outside of their respective urban centers. This increased development of real estate in the outskirts of towns, villages and metropolitan areas is quite often accompanied by a lack of development, redevelopment or reuse of land within the urban centers themselves."  definition of sprawl


"The unplanned, uncontrolled spreading of urban development into areas adjoining the edge of a city." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. 


Noted policy analyst Anthony Downs, at a May 1998 Transportation Research Conference, identified ten "traits" associated with sprawl:

• unlimited outward extension
• low-density residential and commercial settlements
• leapfrog development
• fragmentation of powers over land use among many small localities
• dominance of transportation by private automotive vehicles
• no centralized planning or control of land-uses
• widespread strip commercial development
• great fiscal disparities among localities
• segregation of types of land uses in different zones
• reliance mainly on the trickle-down or filtering process to provide housing to low-income households 

《 URBAN SPRAWL 》

source from youtube