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Armed with recurring analyses since the mid 1960s, economists believe that the under-pricing of traffic congestion in urban areas causes not only excessive travel but also excessively low land use densities and excessively spread out cities, a condition popularly known as urban sprawl. This conclusion is derived from analyses of a single monocentric city. We extend the analysis to a system of two asymmetric monocentric cities closed in aggregate population, differing by their amenity. In this setup, we analyze the effect of optimally tolling traffic congestion, or of optimally determined urban growth boundaries (UGBs), a constrained optimum regime that can also be implemented by taxes and subsidies on land. We prove that either policy regime may expand aggregate urban land use relative to laissez-faire. This is certainly true when the elasticity of substitution between lot size and other goods is sufficiently small and …