Between flailing human limbs in restful abandon, the lavish, lush expanse of estates and uncurbed urban growth beyond defined centres, the common denominator is a term that mutates with context. In transgressing imposed limits and spreading out, in pause or in flourish, the sprawl remains distinctly human.

A sprawl is not ceaseless, insatiable. It isn't a constant overflowing; it is spilling over. And it isn't about the spill, it is about the finiteness of the container we are told is ideal. Is the city an organism? Is the body a territory? In either, expansion isn't a rallying cry; it is entropy.

The tension between who stays and who 'spills over' shapes this dispatch—from an exhibition at DAM probing housing crises through German suburbia, to Alexander Calder's sprawling 'crazy, dangly thangs' at FLV Paris, to the revival of an ancient Chinese residence lost to urban sprawl.

Cities have always been futilely planned as ideal but fixed centres, shaped instead by the unplanned, the uninvited, the inevitable. Perhaps it's only fitting we make room for sprawl, and then some more.