[TarHeelJ]

Originally Posted by BnaBreaker

In Boston's case, there is roughly 200 years more of growth to be accounted for. I mean, when Atlanta was founded Boston and many of the surrounding communities were already thriving cities. Plus, there are many more towns and cities in the Boston metro in a smaller land area to account for.

I'm not saying that Boston doesn't sprawl to some degree, but it's much more of a case of Boston and surrounding towns like Cambridge, Revere, Somerville and Brookline growing into each other over the course of nearly 400 years rather than a core city rapidly expanding in the auto age to the point where it's outlying developments begin swallowing once small villages and transforming them into sprawling suburbs in a matter of a few decades. The term "sprawl", after all, refers to a distinct type of development, not development in general, and a sizable portion of the development in Boston metro happened before sprawl really even existed, at least in it's current hyper-inefficient form.

So you don't think that this same thing happens in every other large metro? I'm using Atlanta as an example because I'm most familiar with it, but it obviously applies to many other cities as well. The suburbs didn't simply appear out of nowhere. They were towns/cities that predated the city of Atlanta by many years and they grew along with the city, eventually growing together. It doesn't matter that Boston is 400 years old and Atlanta is 200, a very similar thing happened in both places.