How do you feel about Urban Sprawl?

Question

How do you feel about Urban Sprawl?

Answer 1

Obviously it depends a lot on if you are looking at it from a city's perspective or from the perspective of the individual. Its a bit of a nightmare for a city. It becomes pretty easy to create pockets of poverty and make it very difficult on urban residents to succeed at the rate their suburban counterparts do. Likewise it becomes difficult to market your city, which is somewhat important given the rise of the global city, where to excel you need to find something unique to draw people in, but not out of your city.

From the individuals perspective, getting out of the city might be a good thing, especially if opportunity/sprawl is around you. Quite often suburbs are going to have better services, schools and property values, so it can make a lot of sense to move when you have the opportunity.

I usually come down viewing sprawl as a bad thing. Obviously though cities need to be proactive in finding ways to plan and allocate resources to bolster their image, this is very tough to do when your tax base leaves. Likewise, sprawl can be the type of thing that is difficult to curb or reduce once it gets going, and thats not really a sustainable thing to have occur. I think ideally everyone would want sprawl to be less common, but because of policy and individual choice, that likely wont always happen.