Urban sprawl refers to the horizontal spread of a city to form a sparsely populated agglomeration , which expands by progressively engulfing peri-urban areas that were once rural and used for agriculture. This phenomenon, originally American in origin, having spread like wildfire at the beginning of the last century during a period of unprecedented economic development , has returned to prominence in recent decades for a number of reasons.
The causes of a renewed expansion
The conditions today are favorable to urban sprawl constitute a rather complex picture. First of all, contemporary economic phenomena themselves encourage such a development: the outsourcing of the economy has dismantled the structures of the Fordist city, fuelled by large-scale industry and tending to centralise productive activities and therefore the inhabitants themselves, to carry out an authentic urban revolution, centred on post-Fordist cityA city is developing where businesses, which primarily produce services and are small in size, cannot sustain exorbitant costs and therefore reduce their costs by moving to the provinces, where real estate prices are less onerous, while the major economic powers and institutions remain in the center.
In addition to the decentralization of productive activities, socio-cultural dynamics also have a significant impact. The astronomical cost of living for large social groups, insecurity , pollution , and overcrowding are making cities increasingly unattractive . The quality of life is constantly deteriorating, to the detriment of the lower and middle classes, who therefore aspire to flee the metropolis for settlements that do not reduce their income and where they can enjoy a better lifestyle. However, the hemorrhage of inhabitants that occurs in cities is often more natural than forced, because it inevitably follows the hemorrhage of businesses.
An antisocial spiral
At a social level, the long-term repercussions of urban sprawl should raise considerable concern. A genuine crisis is emerging. antisocial spiral, starting from its urban typology par excellence, that is, the sobborgo: looking at the traditional dichotomy between society and community, the suburb does not recover either the city (expression of the first), which indeed it seeks to escape, nor the country (expression of the second). After all, urban sprawl simultaneously mortifies that flow of culture, innovations and social exchanges that embodies the city, the source of social change, without nevertheless recreating the trusting, socially cohesive and homogeneous dimension typical of the country, the repository ofsocial order.
Urban sprawl leads to the privatization of the city, impoverishing human relations and social capital , and to the fragmentation of society: socially uniform neighborhoods are formed, intended only for certain social classes, to whom they are therefore exclusively accessible. The suburbs, by their very nature, exclude those who are different, be they criminals, foreigners, ethnic groups, or lower social classes, preferring the complete social leveling of their residents. The proliferation of suburbs, which are the refuge of the middle class, also mirrors the inevitable formation of new ghettos, which are instead the prison of the working classes. There are those, certainly adopting a catastrophic vision, who believe that in the future cities will become enormous ghettos: the upper classes will live in the narrow center, while the working classes will live in the ghetto-like outskirts. Instead, to maintain their lifestyle, the middle class will settle in the suburbs adjacent to the metropolis.
Urban sprawl in Europe and Italy
Urban sprawl affects almost all the continents of the world: from the North to the South of the globe. It is the result of a rapid and uneven development, which involves on the one hand the rapid formation of a middle class however a minority and which settles in new neighborhoods, at the gates of the city, and on the other hand an oceanic influx of migration from the poorest areas of the country, which continues to have a largely poor population. The phenomenon is weaker in Europe, where social inequalities are less pronounced than in the rest of the world, although they are growing.
In Italy, urban sprawl is due to historical reasons: the Bel Paese is dotted with ancient cities and towns, which in turn have favored a development focused on small and medium-sized businesses. Always nicknamed "The Country of a Hundred Cities," metropolises are few and no single city stands out, while a succession of medium-sized cities with long histories abound, each with its own specific identity and historic center . Italy, the cradle of municipal civilization, has always been densely populated. Nonetheless, precisely those cities and towns with the longest tradition are nowadays experiencing depopulation in favor of new, suburban-like housing developments, impoverishing the Italian urban fabric. Fortunately, certain tendencies of urban sprawl that have emerged in other parts of the world, such as fortified communities with all their fences and frenetic neighborhood patrols, are still absent, in Italy as throughout the Old Continent.
Stefano Ghilardi
