No. Because a house is simply a nicer place to live than a flat.
It's very possible to have nice houses without endless suburban sprawl. They can indeed learn from our mistakes; have nice houses, but without endless suburban sprawl.
First of all I absolutely reject your claim that houses offer a priori simply a nicer place to live than flats. Sure there exists certain combinations of price point, geographic location and life situation where it holds, but it certainly isn't a given.
Secondly how are you going to build nice affordable houses for 1.4 billion people without sprawl. Are you suggesting completely giving up on urbanization and going back to having countless tiny villages?
There are many very nice places to live in the world that are not afflicted with suburban sprawl and provide houses to live in, yet are not tiny villages. I'm not going to sit here and fill in the gaps in your imagination; I suspect you've already made your mind up.
There are many very nice places to live in the world that are not afflicted with suburban sprawl and provide houses to live in, yet are not tiny villages
Absolutely, but they either suffer from rapidly rising houses prices or no appreciable population growth. If you stick to a population ceiling of say 50k or so then many problems are easy
But we are talking about about places that are seeing up to a million new people show up in just a few years. Building everybody a nice house is neither realistic nor, in my opinion, desirable. We've either got to re-think the whole "everybody gets a nice house" or try to reverse urbanization in favour of lots and lots of small town capped at around 50k population.
It's very possible to have nice houses without endless suburban sprawl. They can indeed learn from our mistakes; have nice houses, but without endless suburban sprawl.