Chinese cities are experiencing rapid urban expansion and being transformed into more dispersed urban form which necessitate the quantification of fine-scale intra-urban characteristics for sustainable urban development. We propose an integrated multi-level and multi-dimensional method to characterize urban sprawl and apply it to Wuhan, a typical metropolitan area in central China from 1996 to ...

t potential environm impacts. Many of the consuming land faster th tions are growing, pushing t urban and suburban pollution fa rural corridors. Chicago and Los An for example, have over the last 20 yea increased their land area more than 10 times faster than their populations. In a particularly striking example of sprawl, Phoenix, Arizona, is encroaching upon the desert at a rate of one acre p...

Cities often experience growth either physically, by population, or by a combination of both. Urban sprawl in recent times is a subject of popular debate between policy makers and environmentalists in context of the status of urban people and the state of the human ecology. With the high pace of social and economic development resulting growth of urban population, lack of infrastructure, conges...

Land use patterns affect the costs of providing public infrastructure and services such as roads, water, sewage, garbage collection, school transport and mail delivery. Various studies show that these costs tend to increase with sprawl (dispersed development outside existing urban boundaries), and can be reduced with Smart Growth (compact, planned development within existing urban boundaries). ...

We investigate spatial patterns of residential and nonresidential land use for 257 U.S. metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, measured with 14 empirical indices. We find that metropolitan areas became denser during the 1990s but developed in more sprawl-like patterns across all other dimensions, on average. By far the largest changes in our land use metrics occurred in the realm of employment, w...

Sprawl has been loosely defined as dispersed and inefficient urban growth. We propose a series of five indicators that examine the per capita consumption of land taken in new development in relation to several critical land resource impacts associated to sprawl including: (1) density of new urbanization; (2) loss of prime farmland; (3) loss of natural wetlands; (4) loss of core forest habitat; ...

Baldwin et al. (2007 [this issue]) raise a number of concerns about our efforts to discern the independent effects of human activity levels and distributions on biodiversity (Brown & Laband 2006). Their central point of contention seems to be that we failed to acknowledge properly in our work that “land-use change due to sprawl is a leading threat to biological diversity in the United States.” ...

The growth of European cities in recent decades, mainly characterized by a decreasing density and a functional segregation, has tendentially increased mobility, soil consumption, urban sprawl, social disparities and infrastructural costs. Hence, most European countries have decided to aim for an urban sprawl limitation, in particular by increasing the density of built urban areas. To achieve th...