From Walkable City to Automobile-Oriented Life: Urban Sprawl and Everyday Life in Erbil

Abstract

Research on urban form and travel counts the journeys people make. It rarely counts the ones they stop attempting, or asks who in a household loses reach when a city disperses. This study takes up both. Car use is treated as the path rather than the destination: perceived urban form is the antecedent, car reliance the mediator, and the outcome is automobile-oriented life, defined here as the degree to which ordinary activities work only with a car and measured partly by what a household gave up as too much trouble. Erbil affords an unusual test: three residential form generations stand at once inside one city, one climate and one fuel price. Six hundred households were sampled, 200 per generation. Perceived form lowers car reliance (β = −0.509) and reaches daily life mainly through it: the indirect path is −0.284 against a direct effect of −0.211, so 57 per cent of the total effect travels through the car; the car-reliance path strengthens from 0.40 to 0.71 across the generations. The loss is not shared. Children reach 0.99 places alone a day in the oldest fabric, 0.48 in the newest. Sprawl in Erbil did not reduce access; it reallocated it to those who drive.