Urban Sprawl and Land Use policies

During the last century, a deep discontinuity occurred in urban growth patterns: a break between the pre-existent urban development model, where building growth was led by the planning rules typical of compact cities, and the following model characterizing the contemporary town where growth has exponential speed, and incoherent and chaotic forms. This phenomenon, commonly called urban sprawl, interests almost all the main urbanized areas of the world, even if its evolution has had different origins and paths in the diverse geographic areas. Studies that until now have examined the history of contemporary urbanization appear varied and composite in relation to the different cultural and social settlement situations in which urbanization took hold. Each context seems to be the result of a different creative process, of several heterogeneous stories describing diverse events, knowledge and habits. It is important to highlight, as this chapter observes, how territories of deeply different cultural, economic, and social points of view, through different evolutionary trajectories, have produced spaces with similar characteristics. The homologation of the results seems to be in contrast with the multiplicity of trajectories that produced them, but different stories could have common threads that can be tied again to build one single story. This chapter rewrites the fragmentary history of urban sprawl in the light shed by those who can be considered the homogenizing factors helping to define the domain of any trajectory of urban evolution. To reconstruct a single story from all different urban histories is needed to define action systems and strategies aiming at imposing an organizing structure on the spaces of the urban sprawl. Current strategies are discussed and some new ones are proposed for the existing suburbs. The thesis intervention in diffused urbanization can’t be reduced to the identification of spaces to be transformed and activities to be introduced. It is a more complex work requesting active involvement of the community to define spaces able to give rise to new identities. The main results include a new approach to urban sprawl study, the identifying and the role of the forces underlying urban sprawl, and the identifying of a system of actions on different levels to intervene in urban sprawl.