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Adam Radzimski, Gran Sasso Science Insitute, Italy, and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
If one had to choose just one keyword to synthetically characterise the complex reality of urban development in the 20th and early 21st century, one should probably choose the word ‘suburbanisation’. Depending on historical and local conditions, cities have been extending their built-up structures at different pace and in different forms, yet the growth of suburbs appears to be a process that has been taking place in practically every place of the world. Regarding suburbanisation, the opinions from the ecological, social and economical point of view are pretty much divided. Yet particularly one form of suburbanisation has been particularly often criticised from the sustainability point of view. This form is characterised by a scattered, low-density, and often unplanned development pattern, and it is usually called urban sprawl.
It is generally agreed that sprawl was born in the USA with the advent of mass motorisation and low cost mortgage loans. Western Europe and other economically developed countries of the world soon followed suit. However, as it is sometimes argued, in some cases due to more planning restrictions the urban expansion patterns were somewhat less ‘sprawling’, i.e. more compact and more high-density. To some countries urban sprawl arrived with a delay. This is particularly the case of the states of the former socialist block, where the settlement structures were prevented from sprawling by rules that favoured compact and high-density prefab housing estates over single-family homes suburbs. And of course, the low level of economic prosperity as well as the lack of ‘sprawl-friendly’ things like automobiles and mortgages also played a role.
After 1989 the post-socialist countries have begun to ‘mimic’ the western world in many ways. Living in a suburban house, which seemingly combined all the benefits of urban and countryside life came to be seen as the ideal of the new aspiring middle classes. National planning systems, which have now switched the priorities after years of supremacy of the public interest over the private one, tended to favour this pattern. On the other hand, urban regeneration was hampered by unresolved restitution claims, complicated monument preservation requirements, and lack of financial support from the public hand (with some notable exceptions, including in particular cities in eastern Germany).
Until recently, the dominance of suburbanisation as the main process shaping urban structures in the post-socialist context seemed to be undisputed. The perceptions of this phenomenon generally varied from affirmation that sees even the most sprawling forms of suburbs as a ‘natural’ city expansion, to sceptical acceptance that seems suburbanisation as not perfect but unavoidable. Voices of those who argued that actually the post-socialist cities had a high potential of developable land within the built-up structures, were r