The issue of urban sprawl is considered very serious by many communities, hence it has become necessary for urban planners to take this into consideration. Measures are also needed as urban growth considered as sprawl by some, may be considered normal expansion with a growing population by others. In order to compare cities and their “degrees of sprawledness”, an index is needed to describe the level of sprawl in a city. However, urban sprawl has many definitions depending on the perspective.
This project seeks out to test the robustness to change in spatial support and spatial extent of the urban sprawl measure implemented a decade ago by Burchfield et al. (2006) on the conterminous United States. They calculate urban sprawl as the percentage of open space surrounding residential cells using a fixed $1 km^{2}$ grid. Instead of a fixed grid, we use a moving $1 km^{2}$ window centred on each residential cell, which is more in line with standard GIS and landscape metrics applications and with the sprawl concept suggested. We also change the areal extent used within each metropolitan area for the calculation. We analyse how our more spatially accurate method affects the sprawl index and the understanding of the factors that contribute to sprawl.
Related talk
Schiel, K., Schindler, M. and Caruso, G. (2013): On MAUP, neighbourhood definitions and the measure of urban sprawl. The European Colloquium on Theoretical and Quantitative Geography (ECTQG) 2013, Dourdan, France.