The Economics of Urban Sprawl: Inefficiency as a Core Feature of Metropolitan Growth

Abstract

Modem cities are both vibrant and chaotic. New businesses rise; ideas, scientific research, and commercial innovations are created; and the aits and humanities pulse. Unfortunately, problems are created as well, and sprawl--geographic growth unrelated to population pressures--comnpounds and complicates them (Katz and Bradley 1999). This paper is a study of urban sprawl in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Like most urban areas, Memphis experienced considerable sprawl during the last half of the twentieth century. It has grown east in Shelby County from the Mississippi River, along the Mississippi state line, toward rural Fayette County. As it enters the twenty-first century, Memphis is poised to armex the rest of unincorporated Shelby County. Urban sprawl already affects two of the other four counties of the Memphis mietropolitan statistical area (MSA)-Desoto, Mississippi, and Crittenden, Arkansas--and is beginning to appear in the last two MSA counties--Fayette and Tipton, Tennessee. A large gambling industry, which provides thousands ofjobs to the urban area, is located just outside and south of the MSA in Tunica County, Mississippi. These expansions exist outside both the local and state jurisdictions of the city of Memphis and its older satellite cities, but all five of these MSA counties, plus Tunica, are clearly part of the Memphis metroplex. The new economic and social burdens that urban sprawl creates are not immediately apparent. The high costs----both current and 1uture-of urban sprawl are swamped by its immediate advantages. Indeed, for most urban residents sprawl seems to be a fundamental part oi the process of urbanization.