Urban Sprawl, Daily Mobility, and Community Cohesion in Suburban Fringe Areas

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative literature review on urban sprawl and social life in suburban fringe areas. The review synthesizes scholarship on how dispersed urban form, functional separation, and gated residential patterns reshape everyday interaction, neighboring practices, and community cohesion. The findings indicate that longer distances and car-oriented layouts reduce incidental encounters, shift sociability toward scheduled meetings, and foster segmented networks tied to schools, workplaces, and managed facilities. Sprawl-related mobility regimes intensify time scarcity, fatigue, and uneven access to participation, particularly for households without private vehicles, caregivers with chained trips, youth, and older adults. These conditions weaken shared routines that sustain trust, collective efficacy, and inclusive decision making at neighborhood scale. The review also shows that privatized security and semi-public commercial spaces can increase perceived order while narrowing cross-group mingling. The article concludes by proposing a conceptual linkage between spatial dispersion, mobility constraints, and the social production of belonging, highlighting the need for planning that supports walkable local amenities, reliable public transport, and genuinely public meeting places. Future research can operationalize these propositions through comparative suburban cases and mixed indicators of interaction frequency and civic participation overall.