Read the article and underline the problems European cities face. Summarize the article in 5-7 sentences mentioning the most serious problems

TACKLING EUROPE'S SPRAWL

A nearly iconic fact of life in the United States, urban sprawl had been slow to evolve in Europe. While sprawl was not unknown — Paris, London, Brussels, every major city has long had outlying rings of lower density development — most European cities had, even late into the 20th century, remained far more compact than their American counterparts. They were still places where people walked or took public transportation to local shops, restaurants or theaters. That this is no longer the paradigm — that cities from Luxembourg to Prague, from Madrid to Istanbul, are experiencing accelerating sprawl and its increased automobile traffic, CO2 emissions, energy consumption, land fragmentation, natural resource degradation, watershed damage, farmland decline, and social polarization — has become a major concern across the continent.

Yet Europe's urban sprawl has had a counterintuitive streak: it has happened during a period of declining population. Over the last 20 years, many eastern and western European cities have expanded their built areas by 20 percent while their populations have increased an average of only 6 percent. Over that same 20-year period in Europe there have been four times the number of new cars on the road as the number of babies born. Over the next 20 years the number of kilometers traveled in urban areas will increase 40 percent, an increase that will negate any expected gains in fuel efficiency, and make reaching Europe's Kyoto goals of reducing CO2 emissions nearly impossible.

All of this troubles the European Union and it should, since much of it, the EU admits, is its own creation. Sprawl, the EU recognizes, has followed the money — its money. EU investments in transnational regional growth following the member states' economic integration, while intended to level the playing field, in the end favored capital cities over smaller cities and towns. Improved transport links — highways designed to accommodate increased freight traffic — have led to American-style intercity corridors built up with new industrial and commercial developments. Auto-centric suburbs with low-density housing tracts and shopping malls have followed, and public transit has not been able to keep pace.

In the 1990s, abetted by a much expanded highway system, Madrid's urbanized land area increased by 50 percent compared with 5.4 percent in the rest of the EU. During this same period the area's population grew by only 5 percent.

In the newest EU countries, those in Eastern Europe that had been communist, the changes have been even more drastic. Central planning demanded high-density housing and public transit. State-owned agricultural land was not open for development. In Romania, for instance, the Ceausescu government had even demolished houses to free up land for apartment blocks. With the end of Ceausescu's rule, agricultural land was returned to its original owners and a "chaotic patchwork" of housing plots began to sprawl outward from the cities with little regard for planning or environmental protection.

With its entry into the EU in 2007, Romania's economy grew 5.7 percent, and the year after, 7.5 percent. This economic development drove residential construction up 29.3 percent in 2007, and along with it, the number of cars — up 27 percent. This growth has become a great cause for concern among environmentalists, as Romania's extensive forests are some of the least disturbed habitats in Europe.

The losses to Europe's natural and scenic reserves may be the most irreversible effects of its sprawl. Natura 2000, the EU's network of natural reserves, is increasingly finding urban sprawl encroaching on its sites and new transit corridors running through them. Via Baltica, a planned road network connecting the Baltic States and Finland to the rest of the EU will cross through valuable forest and marsh lands, including the Augustow and Knyszn Primeval Forests and the marshes of Biebrza in Poland, one of the few natural wetlands remaining in all of Europe.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

6.2. You want to participate in a project competition devoted to urban sprawl. Write your mini-project on “The Ways of Taming Urban Sprawl”. The winner will travel to pristine European areas (like Polish wetlands, Norwegian fjords, Carpathian virgin forests, etc).