Section: New Results

Calculating spatial urban sprawl indices using open data

Urban sprawl has been related to numerous negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Meanwhile, urban areas have been growing at alarming rates, urging for assessing sprawl towards sustainable development. However, sprawl is an elusive term and different approaches to measure it have lead to heterogeneous results. Moreover, most studies rely on private/commercial data-sets and their software is rarely made public, impeding research reproducibility and comparability. Furthermore, many works give as result a unique value for a region of analysis, dismissing local spatial diversity that is vital for urban planners and policy makers.

Based on our last year's initial work [19], we have developed an extended open source framework for assessing urban sprawl using open data. Locations of residential and activity units are used to measure mixed use development and built-up dispersion, whereas the street network is used to measure accessibility between different land uses. Sprawl patterns are identified, and the resulting spatial information allows focusing on particular neighborhoods for a fine-grained analysis, as well as visualizing each sprawl dimension separately.

This work has been published in [10], [14], [15] and the associated implementation is available as open source software (see previous section).