Please update your views of European urbanism (browsing Google's aerial photos should be enough). Urban sprawl is the defining key of the last 50 years.

Here is a starting point, miles and miles away from the historical centre of Toulouse: https://www.google.fr/maps/@43.537841,1.2268468,2639m/data=!...

Now it is not only happening around cities, around big towns, around small towns, it also happens at unprecedented speed around the tiniest villages.

A site that puts side by side aerials from now and from before urban sprawl: https://remonterletemps.ign.fr/comparer/basic?x=1.212446&y=4...

Back in huge cities. The city of Paris is much less populated than one century ago. Now it represents only 1/6th of the population of its urban area, an ogre which has swallowed almost 2000 municipalities (two thousand!).

Elsewhere in the country, you see urban areas from cities multiple dozens of miles apart joining in a continuous sprawl. Heck, even in my deep and remote area disconnected from any city or even town, there is now 5 miles of sprawl joining the 3 villages of the valley in continuous strips along the roads; before the sprawl, population of my municipality was 50% higher, and yet 80-90% of the now occupied space was free.