Section: New Results

Calculating indices for urban sprawl

Urban sprawl is a complex concept, that is generally associated with auto-oriented, low-density development. It is the subject of a wide range of research efforts, aiming at understanding and characterizing the underlying driving factors. We have followed up on an effort by Burchfield et al. who proposed a simple measure for urban sprawl, a so-called sprawl index. We proposed several variants of this index with the aim of achieving richer and/or more flexible characterizations of urban sprawl [16] . We also proposed ways of determining metropolitan areas that have similar patterns of urban sprawl, using clustering techniques.