Introduction

This book takes up a topical issue in spatial planningSpatialspatial planning, land use policyLandland use policy, housing studies, and sustainable urban geography—the fight against urban sprawl leading to new urban densification strategies—and interrogates the consequences of densification from the perspective of its impacts on social sustainability. Such an analysis is absolutely necessary considering that the arguments in favor of densification have so far relied mostly on discourses of ecological and economic sustainabilitySustainability. However, planners, policymakers, and urban practitioners cannot avoid the question of the social dimension of densification, if only to secure the social acceptance of densification objectivesDensificationdensification objectives without which implementing densification will quickly become very difficult. This chapter announces the research objectives and clearly formulates the general question, which is then broken down into three sub-questions.