Recent Literature about Urban Sprawl: A Renewed Relevance of the Phenomenon from the Perspective of Environmental Sustainability

The urban sprawl phenomenon has attracted the attention of social researchers since the mid-20th century. It seemed that all relevant aspects had been extensively studied and that it would be difficult to produce new studies with significant contributions. However, in the last decade, we have witnessed a revival of the literature on urban sprawl for three main reasons: (i) the existence of new methodologies to measure the phenomenon based on digital cartography and geo-referenced information, (ii) new hypotheses about the relevance of the formation of metropolitan areas not institutionally integrated into urban sprawl in many places and, mainly, (iii) the role of urban density in the environmental sustainability of cities. The recent literature on this third aspect has grown the most and around which it seems that new and interesting lines of future research will develop. The objective of this work is to present a synthetic review of the most recent literature on urban sprawl as of the end of the second decade of the XXI century. This review can serve to recapitulate the growing consensus that is being formed on the lower environmental sustainability of low-density cities and diffuse limits.