Rome after Sprawl: a Return to the Compact City?

Over the last few decades, high numbers of migrants from abroad have come to Rome, transforming it into a multicultural city. It also continues to be a magnet for migration from Italy's southern regions and has undergone a process of intense urban sprawl which has spread housing and residents across the entire metropolitan area in a context from which local or regional planning is largely absent, severely impacting the quality of life of the city's peri-urban population. The economic crisis has had the clear effect of reversing the process of urban sprawl for the first time, with lower property prices enabling many families and households to move back towards the city centres and others to stay. In this article, Rome will be used to highlight the effects that the recent economic crisis has had on the process of spatial redistribution of an urban population and examine the limitations of local planning that ignores current trends and citizens' needs. The paper is mainly based on the use of microdata from population records. Following a brief review of the development and impact of sprawl in Rome, it sets out the ways in which sprawl has been slowed and its connections with the crisis in the real estate sector, in order to show how the current economic condition may foreshadow a new stage in urban development towards residential densification and a rejuvenation of the compact city.