Evaluating Urban Sprawl From Space

"The new high-resolution data allow the authors to observe the amount of open space in the neighbourhood of every house in every U.S. city. Since development is more scattered when there is more open space around a house, the authors measured urban sprawl by calculating the average amount of open space in the neighborhood of a house in each city."

Among the conclusions:

"Recent urban development in Los Angeles is less scattered than recent development in Boston. Miami is America's most compact big city and Pittsburgh is most sprawling. Changing the number or size of municipal governments in a metro area has no impact on whether or not urban development is scattered, but controlling access to groundwater does."

..[M]ore recent residential development is not any more scattered than development was in 1976. Forty two per cent of land in the square kilometre surrounding the average residential development in 1976 was open space, compared with 43 per cent in 1992. "While a substantial amount of scattered residential development was built between 1976 and 1992, overall residential development did not become any more biased toward such sprawling areas."

Thanks to Ashwani Vasis