The development of dispersed urbanism in Spain ran parallel to the real estate boom and consolidated a new model of city sprawl based on the expansion of suburban areas. This process, which started in the mid 1980s, came to a halt with the onset of the economic crisis in 2007. With it, construction stopped, mobility fell, and urban growth came to a standstill. The purpose of this article is, firstly, to analyse the recent evolution and chronology of the expansion of dispersed urbanism in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR) in order to gain an insight into some of its explanatory factors, and secondly, to look into the future middle-term prospects of dispersed urbanism in the BMR and Spain. (...)