The entrenchment of urban dispersion: Residential preferences and locationpatterns in the dispersed city

The paper portrays three aspects of urban dispersion: urban structure, resi dents' location and land-use preferences, and social ecology. To explain th e dynamic inherent in this form of urbanisation, it suggests an explanatory model concentrating on shifts in the respective importance of space, place and proximity associated with the passage from traditional monocentric to dispersed urban form. The paper draws its empirical substance from the Kitc hener Census Metropolitan Area, one of the most dispersed metropolitan regi ons in Canada, The Kitchener case study highlights the defining characteris tics of a dispersed urban structure: high automobile dependence, a scatteri ng of origins and destinations, and a resulting absence of pronounced acces sibility gradients. The paper also reports the results of a survey which in dicates a harmonisation of residents' preferences with the main features of dispersion. The case study ends by mapping the residential location patter ns of two groups with a disproportionate influence on new urban development : high income households and families with children, Their concentric distr ibution is consistent with survey results. In the light of the prevailing t ransport-land-use relation and of residents' location choices and expressed preferences, the paper foresees a further entrenchment of the dispersed ur ban structure,The paper closes by explaining the limited success of most in tensification policies and by exploring the possibility of injecting more d iversity into the dispersed landscape in order to accommodate a growing var iety of lifestyles.