Quote:
Originally Posted by TarHeelJ
That situation is very applicable to many other cities as well. Most of Atlanta's major suburbs pre-date the city of Atlanta and were established cities that were as large or larger than Atlanta for many years. Boston is not unique at all in this way.
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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.