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...

Most U.S. metropolitan regions have experienced urban ‘‘sprawl,’’ or the outward spreading of urban development from city centers. For cities lying in areas prone to severe weather, the sprawl phenomenon exposes greater numbers of developed areas and inhabitants to a variety of thunderstorm hazards. This study’s principal goal is to determine how urbanization growth patterns affect a region’s v...

We investigate the dynamics and spatial distribution of land use fragmentation in a rapidly urbanizing region of the United States to test key propositions regarding the evolution of sprawl. Using selected pattern metrics and data from 1973 and 2000 for the state of Maryland, we find significant increases in developed and undeveloped land fragmentation but substantial spatial heterogeneity as w...

Many city governments choose to supply more developable land and transportation infrastructure with the hope of attracting people and businesses to their cities. However, like those in Taiwan, major cities worldwide suffer from traffic congestion. This study applies the system thinking logic of the causal loops diagram (CLD) model in the System Dynamics (SD) approach to analyze the issue of tra...

Shanken / The Sublime “Jackass” is now an immense aggregation of commercial areas and office buildings. But it remains unincorporated, its political structure mirroring its indeterminate morphology. Many suburban and exurban areas, edge cities, and areas of sprawl share this ambiguity of governance and physical boundary. That they also share an abundance of neglected and remaindered spaces make...

The Land Transformation Model (LTM), which has been developed to forecast urban-use changes in a grid-based geographical information system, was used to explore the consequences of future urban changes to the years 2020 and 2040 using non-urban sprawl and urban-sprawl trends. The model was executed over a large area containing nine of the major coastal watersheds of eastern Lake Michigan. We fo...

In this article, we review articles published in planning journals since 2001 that focus on the environmental impacts of sprawl and assess the extent to which this research addresses what we see as two of the most important meta-challenges for environmental planning and management in the coming decade—resilience and justice. Our review organizes the sprawl’s impacts by four elements – earth, ai...

This article examines sprawl without growth in former East Germany at a number of different metropolitan scales using a dataset from the Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung (Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning). Specific political, social, and economic circumstances in eastern Germany following reunification distinguish it not only from other declining regions, but also from so...