Introduction. – The land take is now a central and diriment issue in many disciplines due to the complex problems involved in the depletion of soil resource from an environmental, economic, urban and social perspective, but it is certainly linked to the phenomenon of urban sprawl. In the short-medium term, the land take is a process as destructive as irreversible. Therefore, a research of the m...

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...

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...