The Effects of Urban Sprawl on Poverty in the City from Which It Emanates

Abstract

Urban sprawl has been widely criticized in academia and other forums for the slew of aesthetic eyesores it has created and environmental issues it has exacerbated. Less discussion or research has taken up sprawl’s effects on poverty and how they intersect with class and race to self-propagate. In this paper, I gather findings from existing research on the subject and explain points of consensus and discord among scholars. The three ways by which urban sprawl worsens poverty are found to be spatial mismatch, the physical alienation of inner-city dwelling residents from suburban centres of concentrated employment; income segregation, the relegation of lower income residents to places of low job-concentration; and racial segregation, the spacial sorting of residents by race so that racial diversity decreases in given areas of residence. It is also found that these factors, which contribute to poverty and are driven by sprawl, also then drive sprawl themselves, creating feedback loops intensifying segregation and poverty. The inception of the modern city and the process of urban sprawl are also discussed. It is found that the same processes which created high population concentration to create the first cities during the industrial revolution, notably the advent of labour centres, drive modern urban sprawl. This and other processes are then used in the examinations of the above-mentioned issues to calculate the origins of these issues and contextualize them.