City and countryside: Core concepts in the fight against urban sprawl
Urban sprawl continues unabated, in spite of widespread criticism of its impact and strong countermeasures adopted by public authorities. Might it not be argued, in this context, that urban sprawl benefits from the very measures intended to fight it? That hypothesis, far from being ironic, could relaunch the debate about the conceptual categories underlying our understanding of the phenomenon: “city, countryside, urban, rural”. Our analysis of the case of the province of Québec would suggest that criticism of urban sprawl presupposes an absolute dichotomy between the city and the countryside, while the means used to counter it operate on an entirely different basis and in fact facilitate the urbanization of the countryside. Does this mean that the city and the countryside actually constitute two geographical entities that share common attributes, both urban and rural, but combine them differently? If that is so, the challenge for land planners would not simply be to prevent urban sprawl, but rather to ensure the best possible urbanization of the countryside.