The Entrenchment of Urban Dispersion: Residential Preferences and Location Patterns in the Dispersed City

Abstract

The paper portrays three aspects of urban dispersion: urban structure, residents' location and land-use preferences, and social ecology. To explain the dynamic inherent in this form of urbanisation, it suggests an explanatory model concentrating on shifts in the respective importance of space, place and proximity associated with the passage from traditional monocentric to dispersed urban form. The paper draws its empirical substance from the Kitchener Census Metropolitan Area, one of the most dispersed metropolitan regions in Canada. The Kitchener case study highlights the defining characteristics of a dispersed urban structure: high automobile dependence, a scattering of origins and destinations, and a resulting absence of pronounced accessibility gradients. The paper also reports the results of a survey which indicates a harmonisation of residents' preferences with the main features of dispersion. The case study ends by mapping the residential location patterns of two groups with a disproportionate influence on new urban development: high income households and families with children. Their concentric distribution is consistent with survey results. In the light of the prevailing transport-land-use relation and of residents' location choices and expressed preferences, the paper foresees a further entrenchment of the dispersed urban structure. The paper closes by explaining the limited success of most intensification policies and by exploring the possibility of injecting more diversity into the dispersed landscape in order to accommodate a growing variety of lifestyles.