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i agree with oklahoma city. oklahoma city is definitely sprawling out. the I-35 strip from oklahoma city, through moore, and to norman, is filling in with shopping center after shopping center. even the suburb of norman is sprawling down to the south. i've seen countless cookie-cutter neighborhoods popping up SOUTH of norman. it's crazy. another reason that oklahoma city might have so little people per square mile is because the actual city limit of oklahoma city is pretty far out.
indianapolis is, in my opinion, fairly sprawled out. the northern suburbs are exploding and the southern axis is expanding quite quickly as well.
the mississippi suburbs of memphis are booming pretty badly.
my top pick would be dallas and phoenix. as someone mentioned before, dallas/ft. worth is not really locked by any geographic feature, so it sprawls out in all directions and just keeps going. there is mall after mall after mall and houses after houses. i've never seen anything like it. collin county alone has gained 200,000+ people in just 6 years!! it now has more people in this suburban county as the whole county of jefferson, KY (the city of louisville, where i live). it's crazy!
edit: i'm pretty surprised to see lexington, KY on the list. never really thought lexington was sprawled. they actually have very tight growth policies that are intact to preserve the horselands around the city. A little exerpt from wiki:
Anecdotally speaking, a drive down I-10 westward into Los Angeles certainly leaves you feeling like the L.A. metro area should be high on the list for "sprawl." It doesn't seem right that it can take you two and half hours in light traffic to get from the start of "suburbia" to downtown proper.
Chicago's urban area has the 3rd largest footprint in the world after Tokyo and New York City.
The city is very dense, and the suburbs counter that and are actually quite sprawled out in every single direction. From the far northwest suburbs around to east of Gary is something like 120 miles.
The city is slapped up against Lake Michigan, and it's density is almost like a pan full of water that's tipped to one corner. It's all sloshed up against the lake with a density of over 30,000 per square mile, then almost uniformally decreases as you go out 50 miles in each direction. The far west burbs look like anything you'd see in Dallas or Atlanta or Pheonix. Tens of thousands of tract housing swallowing up the farmland and a rapid pace each year. I drive back to Iowa 4 times a year, and each time I note how much further the burbs have spread out. Before too long we're going to eat Rockford, which is a metro of almost 500,000.
The 6 counties on the outside of the Chicago metro area had seen pretty steady growth in the past century, but since 1990 those mostly rural counties have seen an explosion of sprawl that finally hit their borders. In the past 16 years they've grown by over 900,000 people, almost all sprawl. I don't even bother with the burbs.....I'm perfectly fine in the city and not having to deal with the endlessness of the exurbs. That's not even counting the more dense core counties where around 6.5 million of the areas population reside.
Last edited by Chicago60614; 10-30-2008 at 04:00 PM..
Houston sprawls bad, but you guys also have to understand its lots of undeveloped land in Houston also with flood plains, oil fields and bayous. Houston is doing what any other city would've done if it could spread out so far. You guys like to throw in the whole 600 sqm thing, but with a population exceeding over 500,000 in a 100 sqm radius in its inner loop is very nice and pretty dense for a southern city.
I would say:
Atlanta
St. Louis
Cincinatti
Kansas City
Nashville
Washington DC
Oklahoma City
Minneapolis
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