Urban Sprawl and the Challenges for Urban Planning

Abstract

Dispersed urbanization, urban planning and management instruments such as zoning, and urban expansion zones, have become increasingly consistent in leading cities toward an uncertain and chaotic future. The urban perimeters of municipalities have been used increasingly in favor agents of the reproduction of unequal urban space, aggravating the process of socio-spatial segregation, the formation of urban gaps and real estate speculation. Inherent to this process, infrastructure, one of the most important components of urban land and one of the most costly for local governments, has become increasingly dispersed and obsolete in the midst of the disordered occupation of the city’s land. Based on the above, this paper aims to analyze the phenomenon of urban sprawl in the city of Londrina by means of geotechnologies and to identify the impacts that the form of land occupation the city has employed may cause on the current and future scenario of the municipality in general. To this end, thematic maps were drawn up from multiple sources, which, allied to a review of the literature, indicate that the municipality of Londrina exhibits intense characteristics of the phenomenon of urban sprawl, leading to consequences for territorial ordering and the egalitarian spatial distribution of essential services to the population.