Abstract
… it is essential … that the town should be planned as a whole, and not left to grow up in a chaotic manner as has been the case with all English towns, and more or less with the towns of all countries. A town, like a flower, or a tree, or an animal, should, at each stage of its growth, possess unity, symmetry, completeness, and the effect of growth should never be to destroy that unity, but to give it greater purpose….
– Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1898
This paper considers whether planning policies, as practiced in the world’s cities, have the potential for controlling or limiting the expansion of urban land use. The question is certainly relevant for design of policies to respond to urban sprawl. The analysis does not establish that these constraints are necessarily desirable, but does find some evidence that some aspects of planning regulations can be effective in limiting urban expansion.
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Notes
- 1.
The first use of the term to describe urban expansion identified in the Oxford English Dictionary is in August of 1955, when a writer in the Times asserted that it was “… sad to think that London’s great sprawl will inevitably engulf us sooner or later, no matter how many green belts are interposed in the meantime between the colossus and ourselves.” Thus apparently from the very beginning there were doubts about the efficacy of planning policy in limiting urban expansion. Earlier usages of the term include that by Frederic Osborn (1946), a disciple of Ebenezer Howard, who attributed suburban sprawl to improved transportation available through “electric traction … and the petrol or gasoline motor….” Black (1996) attributes the first use to Earle Draper, an urban planner active in several southeastern US cities.
- 2.
The TM or Thematic Mapper instrument was included in Landsats 4 and 5 and so potentially provide data from late 1982 through 2007. The ETM or Enhanced Thematic Mapper instrument is on Landsat 7 and so provides data beginning in late 1999.
- 3.
This explains why the smallest city in our sample is listed as having a population in the earlier time period of less than 100,000. While all of our urban areas had 1990 populations of 100,000 for the metropolitan region, this was not quite true once we had truncated some sub areas to account for portions not covered by the satellite image and adjusted for the satellite image date.
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Sheppard, S. (2013). Do Planning Policies Limit the Expansion of Cities?. In: Klaesson, J., Johansson, B., Karlsson, C. (eds) Metropolitan Regions. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32141-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32141-2_12
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