The Environmental Impacts of Urban Sprawl: Integrating New Evidence and Emergent Issues

In this article, we review articles published in planning journals since 2001 that focus on the environmental impacts of sprawl and assess the extent to which this research addresses what we see as two of the most important meta-challenges for environmental planning and management in the coming decade—resilience and justice. Our review organizes the sprawl’s impacts by four elements – earth, air, water and fire – and by developed and developing country contexts. Our assessment looks for reference to meta-challenges and consideration of multiple issues, elements or contexts. We find evidence that the sprawlrelated research from last decade often engages the meta-challenges of resilience and justice, the array of environmental outcomes being considered within individual sprawl studies is expanding, and distinctions between studies from developed and developing countries are increasingly difficult to detect.