Introduction

A spectre is haunting Europe. The name of the spectre is not communism (Engels and Marx 1848) but urban sprawl, a phenomenon which has little to do with communism, but the metaphor of describing urban sprawl as a spectre is not new, especially in the United States where sprawl is endemic and there is a widespread concern over its environmental and public impact (Schmidt 1998). Urban sprawl can be defined as the low-density expansion or leapfrog development of large urban areas into the surrounding rural land. Several definitions also include the fact that the development takes place without systematic regional land use planning and control (e.g. EEA 2006; Reckien and Karecha 2007).