Urban Sprawl in Eastern Europe. The Sofia City Example

The urban sprawl has been defined as an excessive conversion of rural land into urban land, or excessive increase of the city beyond the optimal city size. Urban sprawl became a hot topic firstly in United States where the problem of low-density city emerged in the late 70’s and early 80’s. In Europe urban sprawl wasn’t an issue until very recently due mostly to the structure of the European cities, which traditionally are much more concentrated and densely populated in contrast to the US cities. However, today we can observe European cities showing signs of urban sprawl, such as excessive decentralization, road congestion, lack of open space, overpopulation, etc. The purpose of our study is to examine whether there are signs of urban sprawl across the cities in Eastern Europe, analyzing data for capital of Bulgaria - Sofia. The paper will be organized in the following way: Section 1 – An Introduction, Section 2 – Review of the optimal city size theory, Section 3 – Data and empirical research and Section 4 - Conclusion