Urban sprawl
The expansion of cities onto increasingly large expanses of land is primarily driven by societal value placed on single-family homes in car-dependent low-density suburbs. For example, in the two decades leading up to 2020, Jakarta, Indonesia's capital city, spread outward almost five times faster than it became denser, pointing to a trend of low-density, horizontal city growth.
Unchecked urbanisation, driven by the low economic value assigned to untouched natural land, comes at a cost. The services provided by natural ecosystems, such flood control as rainwater infiltrates the ground, are lost as stormwater runs off roads, collecting pollutants that contaminate water bodies. Society ultimately pays the price of urban sprawl through the need for costly artificial substitutes.
The following are excerpts from reports conducted on Asia’s urbanization.
All images © Sebastian Castelier
The Elephant’s Fight for shrinking Land
Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 - Asian elephant populations have declined by up to 65% over the last 100 years, with the biggest threats being habitat loss to agriculture and urban sprawl. The elephants, squeezed into smaller areas, are forced by circumstances to come into close interactions with human activities as they fight over natural resources. They are too often killed in retaliation.
"Elephants cannot stick to arbitrary boundaries that humans have put on their paths. They follow the natural way of land," said Vinod Malwatte, director of Lanka Environment Fund, an NGO. Sri Lankan farmers use improvised explosive devices to kill crop-raiding pachyderms that feed in their fields, and local authorities have spent millions to build electric fences. Rising human-elephant tensions in Sri Lanka reflect that, between 1980 and 2025, the land area where natural habitats have been replaced by various human construction has more than tripled.
Threat to coastal ecosystems
Malaysia 🇲🇾 - Urban sprawl, in addition to the conversion of forests to large-scale oil palm plantations, have encroached upon Malaysia's humid primary forest area, which has dropped by 18% in the two decades leading to 2023. This sprawl manifests in various forms. On the southern tip of Peninsular Malaysia, a Chinese-built city sheds light on reclaimed lands.
Forest City, a $100 billion project launched in 2014 and branded as a "green futuristic city", has been built by dumping sand on a vast seagrass bed. The underwater plants are a natural carbon sink and plays a vital role in protecting nearby CO2-absorbing mangroves from waves. For now, the project's environmental cost stands in stark contrast to its unrealized promises. The coastal development was planned to hosts 700,000 people, but the build-it-and-they-will-come strategy has fallen flat, and dozen of thousands of apartments remains largely unoccupied.
