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What is "urban sprawl"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
urban sprawl
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A fictionalised countryside comes back to brighten the dark heart of the urban sprawl.
▪ If you want the definition of urban sprawl, look at one-acre or three-acre lots.
▪ It negates home-field advantage for home-grown retailers and contributes to urban sprawl.
▪ Nor are the results of urban sprawl always aesthetic.
▪ Ribbon development, urban sprawl and scattered housing were all brought under reasonable control.
▪ These powers were permissive, and in most of Britain urban sprawl and ribbon development continued more or less unabated.
▪ They soon left the urban sprawl of roundabouts, sodium streetlights and Wimpey homes and Dexter began to speed along country lanes.
▪ This factor had considerable importance in engendering urban sprawl.
Wiktionary
urban sprawl

n. an unplanned, disorganized growth of housing etc on the edge of a city

WordNet
urban sprawl

n. an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities [syn: conurbation]

Wikipedia
Urban sprawl

Urban sprawl or suburban sprawl describes the expansion of human populations away from central urban areas into low-density, monofunctional and usually car-dependent communities, in a process called suburbanization. In addition to describing a particular form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. In Continental Europe the term " peri-urbanisation" is often used to denote similar dynamics and phenomena, although the term urban sprawl is currently being used by the European Environment Agency. There is widespread disagreement about what constitutes sprawl and how to quantify it. For example, some commentators measure sprawl only with the average number of residential units per acre in a given area. But others associate it with decentralization (spread of population without a well-defined centre), discontinuity (leapfrog development, as defined below), segregation of uses, and so forth.

The term urban sprawl is highly politicized, and almost always has negative connotations. It is criticized for causing environmental degradation, and intensifying segregation and undermining the vitality of existing urban areas and attacked on aesthetic grounds. Due to the pejorative meaning of the term, few openly support urban sprawl as such. The term has become a rallying cry for managing urban growth.