What’s in a Name? That Which We Call Sprawl

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet”, Juliet says in William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet (Act II, scene I). Sprawl is undoubtedly not a rose, but as Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms (2017) recall, the term is by no means neutral and is difficult to replace. It has an obvious moral content. When used to refer to a person, sprawl means “an ungainly or carelessly relaxed position in which one’s arms and legs are spread out” 1. By extension, the term also refers to urban development “spread out over a large area in an untidy or irregular way”. Controlling sprawl, therefore, involves rectifying a situation characterised by sloppiness. Fighting sprawl involves correcting the production of urbanisation, particularly on the fringes, where the city is growing and spreading. Hence the title of this special issue: the debate on sprawl refers to the more fundamental question of growth control. As highlighted by Alex Schafran (2019), political questions lie behind the struggle to control urban sprawl: who controls the development of the city fringes? What are the goals? What problems, compromises and alliances are there between the different actors involved? Sprawl is socially constructed as a gap between an existing situation and an ideal, which is why this introduction will not provide a definition of sprawl. This special issue considers sprawl not as an object that can be defined a priori, but as a matter of empirical analysis. Sprawl is what some actors in a city consider to be problematic when it comes to organising the city peripheries and their growth. This special issue shows that there are as many definitions of sprawl as there are actors and cities. In fact, some actors do not think there is a problem. What some disqualify as sprawl, others consider to be urban growth. And to many, such growth is desirable. In the United States, what is now commonly called sprawl was the spatial manifestation of the Fordist regime for years: the detached house with a fridge, washing machine and lawnmower, the shopping mall, business park and motorway. These were the vectors of the middle and working classes’ accession to comfort (Hayden 2004). In many ways, they still are, especially in fast-growing countries. This lifestyle is now widely criticised for being consumerist and for its negative environmental impact. However, it remains an important feature of urban landscapes and is still being widely replicated all over the world (Keil 2017; Berger et al. 2017). The criticisms now used to justify the fight against sprawl focus on environmental issues. Yet, the climate emergency should not prevent discussion and debate on anti-sprawl policies. Following in the tradition of urban political ecology (Swyngedouw, Heynen 2003; Keil 2019, 2020), this special issue will explain the sociopolitical context in which this fight is now taking place. There is no single solution to the environmental problems raised by urban sprawl, there are several. The difficulty is that by choosing one solution over another, there are inevitably winners and losers. The awareness of these inequalities is growing, with an increasing critical literature dealing with growth-control What’s in a Name? That Which We Call Sprawl