Revisiting “Southern” Sprawl: Urban Growth, Socio-Spatial Structure and the Influence of Local Economic Contexts

Economies 2015, 3(4), 237-259; doi:10.3390/economies3040237

Author 

Ilaria Tombolini ¹

, Ilaria Zambon ²

, Achille Ippolito ³

, Stathis Grigoriadis ³

, Pere Serra ⁴

 and Luca Salvati ^1,5,* 

¹

Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA), Via della Navicella 2-4, I-00184 Rome, Italy

²

Department of Agriculture, Forest, Nature and Energy (DAFNE), University of Tuscia, Via S. Camillo de Lellis, I-01100 Viterbo, Italy

³

Department of Architecture and Planning, “Sapienza” University of Rome, Via Flaminia 369, I-00196 Rome, Italy

⁴

Grumets Research Group, Department of Geografia, Edifici B, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, EL-08193 Bellaterra, Spain

⁵

Department of Social and Economic Science, “Sapienza” University of Rome, Piazzale A. Moro 5, I-00185 Rome, Italy

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. 

Academic Editor: Peter Karl Kresl

Received: 24 August 2015 / Revised: 30 November 2015 / Accepted: 15 December 2015 / Published: 21 December 2015

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Economy)

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Abstract 

Given its unpredictable nature, urban sprawl in the Mediterranean region is considered an intriguing (and intricate) socioeconomic issue. Since the 1970s, urban dispersion advanced rapidly in southern Europe—irrespective of a city’s size and morphology—with urbanization rates growing faster than population. A comparison between the metropolitan areas of Barcelona, Rome and Athens reveals how sprawl has occurred in different ways in the three cities, highlighting peculiar relationships between urbanization, land-use and economic structures. Sharing common drivers of change related to population dynamics, socio-spatial structure and deregulated urban expansion, sprawl has adapted to the local economic, cultural and environmental context. Barcelona shows a dispersion pattern towards a more spatially-balanced morphology, with expanding sub-centres distributed around the central city, Rome appears to be mostly scattered around the historical city with fragmented urban fabric and heterogeneous economic functions, Athens is denser, with polarized economic spaces and social segregation. Understanding how place-specific factors influence processes of settlement dispersion in Mediterranean contexts may inform policies of urban containment and land-use management. View Full-Text

Keywords: mediterranean city;  urban form;  land consumption;  economic structure

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).

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