Sustaining What Is Unsustainable: a Review of Urban Sprawl and Urban Socio-Environmental Policies in North America and Western Europe

sustainability Review Sustaining What Is Unsustainable: A Review of Urban Sprawl and Urban Socio-Environmental Policies in North America and Western Europe Carlos Bueno-Suárez 1,* and Daniel Coq-Huelva 1,2 1 Department of Applied Economics II, Universidad de Sevilla, Avda. Ramón y Cajal 1, 41018 Sevilla, Spain; [email protected] 2 Instituto de Estudios sobre América Latina, Universidad de Sevilla Avenida de la Ciudad Jardín 20-22, 41005 Sevilla, Spain * Correspondence: [email protected] Received: 14 May 2020; Accepted: 24 May 2020; Published: 30 May 2020 Abstract: Urban sprawl and its economic, social, and environmental consequences are central issues for approaching more sustainable forms of life and production. This review provides a broad theoretical exploration of the main features of urban sprawl but also of sustainable urban policies in Western Europe and North America. Urban sprawl can be observed in both continents, as the search for higher standards of economic, social, and environmental sustainability is also an essential feature of urban governance in the last years. Urban sprawl has been slightly weaker in Western Europe, as its are cities generally more compact. Moreover, in Western Europe, urban sprawl has sometimes been confronted with ex-ante preventive policies. However, in North America, urban sprawl from the 1950s has been an essential element of the social ordering and, thus, of the American way of life. In both cases, urban sprawl has generated successive rounds of accumulation of built capital, which is currently managed in sustainable ways essentially through ex-post and palliative measures, that is, trying to “sustain what is unsustainable”. In other words, the idea is to make urban sprawl more sustainable but without altering its main morphological elements. Keywords: urban sprawl; urban governance; environmental governance; sustainable urban policies; sustainable transition; bio-social construction; brownfields; greenbelts; greenareas; sustainable mobility 1. Introduction The world population is nowadays over 7.7 billion. The United Nations projections maintain a growing trend with global population close to 10 billion by 2050 [1]. Additionally, the greatest concentration of population around cities since the middle of the 20th century can be observed. This concentration occurs essentially in large cities, which, in the era of globalization, become centers of productive and financial control [2]. Thus, more than 4200 million people currently live in cities and following the estimations of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, 68% of the world population will live in cities in the year 2050 [3]. Such concentration of population and economic activities in cities has been explained on the basis of the concept of External Economies, which, in the urban sphere, takes two forms: Localization Economies and Urbanization Economies [4]. The Localization Economies insist on the reduction of production costs associated with the concentration of productive, commercial, and financial activities. Thus, it is associated with a decrease in corporative costs and an increase in the quality of labor, intermediate goods, and knowledge [5,6]. The economies of urbanization insist on the benefits offered Sustainability 2020, 12, 4445; doi:10.3390/su12114445 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability 2020, 12, 4445 2 of 36 by the proximity of the final markets, which allows increasing the contact with clients and final consumers. In consequence, they consider the size and social diversity of urban centers as essential aspects for understanding the dynamics of business concentration [7]. The operation of the localization and urbanization economies has been essential in the form in which the cities have been historically organized, dimensioning their spaces and activities. In the last 70 years, the transformations in urban morphology have accelerated and deepened in parallel with the increase in mobility of capital, information, people, and goods [8,9]. As shown in Figure1, the present review will focus on the presentation of the main features of the phenomena of urban sprawl in the context of Western Europe (WE) and North America (NA), trying to synthesize both its causes and consequences, mainly in terms of sustainability. This, in turn, will allow an approach to urban policies that have been recently applied using sustainability as a reference. The emphasis on explaining the European and North American cases does not mean that the relevance of urban sprawl in many other territorial contexts, such as Latin America [10], Asia [11,12] or Africa [13] is not recognized. However, in this article, it is understood that there is a set of common causes and effects that justify a specific revision in the European and North American cases. Without going into the content of the discussion that follows, it can be anticipated that in both WE and NA the urban sprawl has as its origin an excess of accumulation in the primary circuit (goods and services) that results in an intense transformation of the territory. Expressed in easier terms, urban sprawl originates from an economic, but also from a territorial overflow of wealth. However, in developing countries, in general, and in practically the totality of areas such as Africa and Latin America, the origins of urban sprawl are very different. Thus, these processes are not derived as much from an overflow of wealth (although this element is also present), but rather from the opposite process, an overflow of poverty that materializes in massive processes of rural–urban migration, land takeovers, and the more or less unlawful building of large sections of popular neighborhoods. In other cases, such as those observable in Asia, there are mixed processes, accompanied by strong state intervention [11,12]. Figure 1. Global structure of the article. Before properly entering in this review, it is necessary to insist that there is no homogeneous and shared definition of urban sprawl phenomena. Nevertheless, a set of specific elements is frequently listed [14,15]. In any case, the academic literature frequently approaches the urban sprawl from a morphological characterization that emphasizes low density, low proximity, and low centrality. Low density is understood as a space generated essentially from single-family dwellings that have a Sustainability 2020, 12, 4445 3 of 36 relatively low population in relation to the space they occupy, producing a territorial model featured by a high consumption of land per inhabitant [16,17]. This is related with high dispersion, understood as a strong distribution of the population across relatively large areas. Low centrality and proximity are understood as a spatial distance between suburbs and central areas [14,18]. However, as will be seen in the following sections, what low density and low centrality exactly meant differs significantly in WE and NA. Urban sprawl is a central element in the present socio-economic and territorial organization. In this sense, a large number of studies and academic reviews have been conducted to expose its main features and consequences. Some of these reviews are referred to NA [19], to WE [20,21], and even to both cases [9,22]. In this context, this review presents two main new features. Firstly, it was carried out using interpretative frameworks based on a Political Economy approach, which made possible to connect urban sprawl with a wide range of theoretical concepts. Among them, elements such as Secondary Circuit of Accumulation, State’s Rescaling, Public Private Partnership, Financialization, Foreclosures, Rur-urbanization, Greenbelts, Brownfields, Traffic Oriented Policies, Green Areas Provision, Environmental Justice, or Green Gentrification have had a special relevance in the analysis. This has allowed obtaining not only a wider vision of urban sprawl dynamics but also to deepen some of the elements on which its future evolution depends. Secondly, this article focuses on the different ways in which the sustainability discourse is shaping urban sprawl. Namely, although it is recognized (and it is demonstrated) that the sustainability discourse is not preventing the advance and much less reverting urban sprawl, the different forms in which “sustainable” public policies are modifying and interacting with urban transformation patterns are analyzed. In addition, this is done by considering a wide range of policies and planning programs. This review is organized as follows. First the methodology is presented. In the following section, the main economic, social, and institutional elements that explain urban sprawl processes in both NA and WE are presented. In the fourth point, some economic, social, and environmental consequences of these processes are analyzed. In the fifth point, some of the various urban policies that have tried to limit or correct some of the most negative impacts of urban sprawl in terms of sustainability are introduced. Finally, in point six, some conclusions are obtained. 2. Methodology The present text analyzes the evolution of the phenomenon of urban sprawl as well as its causes and consequences from a structural and holistic perspective, based on an extensive review of the academic literature. It also reviews some of the initiatives that have been used in the recent past to confront these phenomena, both from ex-ante (preventive strategies) and ex-post (palliative strategies) approaches. The review performed is undertaken from a previously defined structure based on the next phases that we

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