Social Conurbation as Justifiable Urban Sprawl Repercussion

A considerable body of studies suggests that there is a growing concern about the unsuitability of suburbanization as an urban form for the current and future societies, considering its deleterious impact on urban ecology, environmental sustainability, and urban social geography. Urban form is a general term that refers to the arrangement of towns and cities defined by characteristics, such as land use, density, and concentration, levels of connectivity, centrality, diversity, and proximity. Suburbanization as a type of urban form describes the growth of areas on the fringes of major cities.Currently more than half of the US population lives in the suburbs. A consequence of continued suburbanization, however, is urban sprawl . Sprawl refers to the costly infrastructure and automobile-dependent communities on the outer reaches of metropolitan areas characterized by homogeneous land uses, less physical activity, the absence of walkableenvironments, and the risk of pedestrian fatalities. While much of sprawl is driven by the exchange value of landover its use value, the impact of sprawl reaches beyond the physical environment. The creation and reshaping of the physical fabric of the urban form (morphogenesis) leads to a change in the context of urban social geography. Some scholars have suggested that suburbanization produces new environments, new types of people and new ways of life; however, there is little research assessing how these new environments will affect the social geography of inhabitants.This study explores the relationship between spatial distances of urban form and its social distances, which impacts people’s activities at the merging points of neighboring cities’ suburbs, which is called conurbation coined by Patrick Geddes. By this term, he drew attention to the ability of the new technology to allow the cities to spread and agglomerate together. Relatively, the current study coins the term social conurbation, which refers to a phenomenon, occurring in the juncture of suburban communities' social geography in metropolitan areas through a shift of geographical population from urban area to the suburb. This study hypothesize that the growth and expansion of neighboring cities’ physical infrastructures and integration of suburbs’ spatial geography change people’s sociobehavioralSettings, their perception of community, and social network of those communities, which result a merged form of continuous social geography. In most cases, social conurbation is a polycentric social network, in which physical infrastructure has been developed and has the capability to link suburban neighborhoods’ social infrastructure. The integration of dispersed shopping centers, public transportation, public places, and parks generate a stronger social infrastructure that enhances social activities and social well-being of sprawled neighborhoods’ inhabitants. Therefore, the power of the community comes back at the boundary ofconurbanized neighborhoods by reorienting people in a way that enriches diversity, and senseof community. That means, residents of conurbanized neighboring suburbs are able to share urban physical/social infrastructure, work in adjacent neighborhoods, spend their time in shared public places, interact with various environments, get exposed to otherness, and contribute to a vaster social and civic life.Consequently, emerging adjacent suburb neighborhoods create a new social phenomenon and its spatial characteristics with justifiable merits, although the negative impacts of suburbanization by itself are noticeable. These merits transform neighborhoods to communities due to new socio-spatial dynamics of conurbation form as a sociospatial dialectic in which people create or modify geographical spaces in which they live, work, or play

Keywords:

Conurbation , Social Conurbation , Suburbanization , Urban Sprawl , Urban Ecology , Urban Social Geography , Neighborhood , and Community