Sprawlification

Although it began with American consumer society, sprawl is by now a global phenomenon, consuming massive amounts of valuable land.

Theorists tend to dismiss it as chaotic or generic and compare it with the city, often loaded with prejudices.

It is easy to say what sprawl is not rather than what it is.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore because we all live in sprawl or relate to it.

Sprawl is part of our daily life, and it will be much more so in the future, yet we do not have critical tools to observe, understand, and explain it.

It seems there is no common ground to start with.

This book explores ways to reconsider the missing common ground by introducing the term “sprawlification” to replace “sub/urbanization.”

The book presents theoretical writing and a multi-layered atlas of illustrated text as a form of grounding that restores agency to space versus structure.

It gives us original terminologies and methodological mapping and drawing media to see the layers typically hidden in contemporary sprawls, investigating 28 sq.km of Ahmedabad’s sprawl, in India.

Arian Heidari Afshari
(Kerman, 1984), an Iranian Milan-based architect, received his Ph.D. in architecture, urban and interior design from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU), Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Since 2018, he is Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Theory in the School of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Construction Engineering (AUIC) at Politecnico di Milano. He is a former teaching fellow and a regular visiting researcher at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India. He was a visiting scholar at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 2019. Heidari Afshari is the co-author of Mapping Sprawl: A Critique of Graphic Methods of Urban Analysis (Maggioli Editore, 2018), with Richard Ingersoll.