Rethink taxation so people living in suburbs pay proportionately to the cost of running services to them, and you'd very quickly see a denser city. Dense habitation is just way more efficient, more ecologically friendly, and more cost effective. If this was reflected in the law, you'd very quickly get a situation like you have in Germany, where you basically go from multi-storey apartments to farmland with no suburbs in between.
Leipzig has a pretty sharp divide, for example. If you walk west, you hit platenbau, then it's a bunch of farms. I figured a lot of east cities are like this (Gera, for instance, Halle, etc). It could be a matter of perspective - in London, you can drive for about an hour through suburbs before you see a single building more than two stories.
Hm. Could be. Never been in those parts, so far. My experience is much of Rhine-Ruhr Area and then 'the North', mostly Hamburg, sometimes the less crazy parts of Berlin ;-)
Yeah, definitely the rhine-ruhr area has some suburbs, but it's still way more dense than the UK. I get the feeling there's a big divide between west and east basically because of ideology: in the west, the state encouraged women to stay at home (no free kindergartens, tax-splitting between married couples, etc). This in itself makes a house with a garden way more attractive - if you're stuck at home looking after kids, then it's really nice to be able to do stuff in the kitchen while your kids play in the garden. They also had way higher car ownership. There's also stuff like building law (you can generally only build stuff that fits in the locale, so there's more space for potential suburban houses than apartment blocks) which I guess wouldn't be a factor in the east. Also high car ownership, (obviously) higher rates of house ownership, etc.
