URBAN SPRAWL: CHARACTERS, DYNAMICS AND COSTS

Urban dispersion is a relatively recent phenomenon that characterized the contemporary cities. Initially, traditionally compact historical cities were characterized by a progressive growth of the area around compact cities core and only recently urban sprawl has become quite pervasive. Urban sprawl is characterized by low-density, suburban style development patterns that have been the dominant model of growth in the United States over the last 50 years and in the European context more recently. A working definition that has emerged in the urban planning literature is unplanned, uncontrolled, and not functionally related to surrounding land uses and which variously appears as low-density, ribbon or strip, scattered, leapfrog, or isolated development. Other important characteristics of sprawl include dominance of transportation by private automobiles, fragmentation of powers over land use, and large fiscal disparities among individual communities. Together, these features accelerate the spatial expansion of metropolitan areas by creating discontinuous and land use patterns and low overall urban densities. Despite these seemingly straightforward characteristics, sprawl remains a difficult concept because it is often a matter of degree, depending on the age, economy, population, and other circumstances of the urban area in question. The aim of this paper is to describe the development pattern of a metropolisation process, in particular focalizing our research on a specific case study area located in the Veneto region. It is an area of 145 municipalities interested on processes of urban sprawl during the ’70th and ’80th, of densification from ’90th to 2000 and of an increase of built up area through extensive land transformations in the last ten years. The aim of the study is to underline the emerging problems connected to urban sprawl such as the increase of public costs and to describe possible measures of containment of sprawl with the use of planning tools and to tray to show the relationship between the dynamics of urban growth patterns and the public costs necessary to provide public services in order to find out if the different urban forms may affect local public spending. A lot has been written about the causes, the consequences and the negative aspects of urban sprawl but little attention has been devoted to its costs, especially to its impact on local government expenditures. Empirical evidence regarding the economic consequences of sprawl is limited and uncertain. To this extent, this paper aims to contribute to the empirical literature that examines the impact of urban development on local government budget.