Measuring Sprawl across the Urban Rural Continuum Using an Amalgamated Sprawl Index

Measuring Sprawl

Suburban sprawl is one of the most avidly followed urban issues in the United States today. However, despite the level of attention that is afforded sprawl, their remains relatively little understanding of its determinants and its constitution. Previous attempts to measure sprawl have focused largely on costing out its impacts rather than quantifying its characteristics. Also, the characterizat...

Urban sprawl and public health.

When regular steam ferry service between Brooklyn and Manhattan began in 1814, the first commuter suburb became possible. 1 Suburbs continued to develop slowly but steadily during the 19th and early 20th centuries, thanks to transportation advances such as commuter trains and streetcars, the innovations of early real estate developers, and the urge to live in pastoral tranquility rather than in...

Measuring and modeling urban sprawl: Data, scale and spatial dependencies

A Toolkit for Measuring Sprawl

Debate regarding suburban sprawl in urban studies is contentious. It is fair to say that the phenomenon is not fully understood to satisfaction in the academic, policy, or planning communities and there are a host of reasons why this may be the case. Characterization of sprawl in the literature is often narrative and subjective. Measurement is piecemeal and largely data-driven. Existing studies...

Urban Sprawl: Lessons from Urban Economics

strong sentiment against the phenomenon known as “urban sprawl” has emerged in the United States over the past few years. Critics of sprawl argue that urban expansion encroaches excessively on agricultural land, leading to a loss of amenity benefits from open space as well as the depletion of scarce farmland resources. The critics also argue that the long commutes generated by urban expansion c...