New wine in old bottles: The (changing) socioeconomic attributes of sprawl during building boom and stagnation

European cities are shifting towards scattered urban models with important transformations in the local socioeconomic context. With the aim to identify relevant associations with different urban patterns, the present study compares the socioeconomic profile of districts with respectively continuous and discontinuous settlements along the urban gradient in Rome, Italy, during building boom (early 1970s) and economic stagnation (late 2000s). Non-parametric correlation statistics and multivariate techniques were used to investigate the spatio-temporal evolution of 24 indicators (population, settlement, labor market, economic structure) and 14 land-use, environmental and topographic indicators at the municipal scale. The socioeconomic context discriminating discontinuous from continuous settlements in the early 1970s was significantly different from what was observed in the late 2000s. In the early 1970s, economic structure and labor market indicators have played a major role, while demographic variables and heterogeneity in the natural landscape surrounding discontinuous settlements were particularly important in the late 2000s. Policies oriented to urban sustainability and sprawl containment may benefit from an in-depth understanding of the different socioeconomic contexts associated with scattered settlements in expansion and recession times.