Planning a city and its traffic

The fifth entry is a expansão urbana difusa, and it takes four Portuguese words to say what English says in one: « sprawl ». The noun is worth a moment, because it is not a planner’s coinage at all. « To sprawl » is what a body does. A child sprawls across the sofa, a man sprawls in his chair, somebody who trips goes sprawling on the pavement. The picture is of limbs thrown out in no particular order, taking up more room than they need and holding none of it on purpose, and that is exactly the charge the word carries when it is turned on a city: not that the place is large, but that it has spread without shape. The verdict is built in, which is why a report that wants to sound even-handed reaches instead for « dispersed development » or « low-density growth ». Two notes for writing it. It is uncountable, so « urban sprawl » and never « an urban sprawl ». And the adjective has kept the body in it: a sprawling suburb, a sprawling estate, and just as readily a sprawling novel that will not keep to its shape.