1. Urban Sprawl
Thomas J. Nechyba and Randall P. Walsh
Urban sprawl or suburban sprawl is a multifaceted
concept centered around the expansion of auto-oriented,
low-density development. The term urban sprawl
generally has negative impact due to the health,
environmental and cultural issues associated with it.
Urban Economics Literature:
Falling Transportation Costs, Rising Incomes and
Expanding City Footprints.
The monocentric model is a useful starting point for
studying urban patterns and almost certainly leads to
the appropriate identification for the reasons of
urban sprawl.
The paper overview the causes and consequences of urban
sprawl in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on
lower transportation costs and self-sorting of the
population.
The overview also talks about the four issues that raise
equity concerns and clear efficiency issues they are :
congestion on roads
High levels of metropolitan car pollution
The loss of open space amenities
Unequal provision of public goods and services across
sprawling metropolitan suburbs
Local Public Finance Literature:
Local Public Goods, Peer Externalities and
Segregation.
The Tiebouts is a classic article that suggest how
people may sort themselves into different local
jurisdictions based on their tastes for local amenities.
U.S. urban landscape resulted from a combination of car
purchases, large public investments in road
infrastructure, limited public investment in central cities,
and low cultural barriers to household mobility
Western Europe landscapes resulted from a public
transportation within cities, expending greater
resources on maintaining central city amenities and
developing within a culture that is less willing to
consider residential mobility
Bharat Nihalani
MIEM-0312

2. Negative externalities that are caused because of urban
sprawl are as follows:
loss of open space
urban decay
urban air and water pollution
Traffic congestion
low-density housing developments
loss of a sense of community
increasing reliance on the automobile
urban economics literature with its focus on the trade-off
between transportation costs and land rents has succeeded
in identifying the primary causes for the sprawling of
cities in the twentieth century , models often glance over
the micro aspects of how city landscapes within
expanding boundaries evolve. local public finance models
have incorporated the insights from urban models that
make them relevant for an informed discussion of urban
sprawl.
A more integrated approach, perhaps built upon
recent advances in structural locational equilibrium
modeling, could deal more fully with the details of
how sprawl affects households and families. Cities
and suburbs are complicated economies, and most
policies are likely to give rise to similarly
complicated trade-offs
Conclusion
Bharat Nihalani
MIEM-0312