Causes of Sprawl: A Portrait from Space

2006/05/01 by Marcy Burchfield, M. Burchfield, Henry G. Overman +5 · 13 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Environmental Science · #Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis #Land Use and Ecosystem Services #Spatial and Panel Data Analysis

paper · doi:10.1162/qjec.2006.121.2.587

Abstract

We study the extent to which U. S. urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30 × 30 meter cells, we measure sprawl as the amount of undeveloped land surrounding an average urban dwelling. The extent of sprawl remained roughly unchanged between 1976 and 1992, although it varied dramatically across metropolitan areas. Ground water availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralized employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth, and unincorporated land in the urban fringe all increase sprawl.

Citations

• An Economic Theory of Clubs
• A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures

Cited by

• Drivers of Urban Expansion in Europe: A Literature Review of the Roles of Electoral Cycles and Climate Change
• Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa
• Roads, Railroads, and Decentralization of Chinese Cities
• Can the land tax help curb urban sprawl? Evidence from growth patterns in Pennsylvania
• Housing supply and affordability: Evidence from rents, housing consumption and household location
• On the origins of land use regulations: Theory and evidence from US metro areas
• The greenness of cities: Carbon dioxide emissions and urban development
• The economics of outer space: Regulation, market failures, and industry prospects
• Growth and decline in rural Spain: an exploratory analysis
• Adverse Selection in Reverse Auctions for Ecosystem Services
• Using satellite imagery to measure the impacts of new highways: An application to India
• The heterogenous effects of motorways on urban sprawl: causal evidence from Portugal
• Object Recognition for Economic Development from Daytime Satellite\n Imagery

Related

• Wrestling Sprawl to the Ground: Defining and measuring an elusive concept
• Causes of Urban Sprawl in the United States: Auto reliance as compared to natural evolution, flight from blight, and local revenue reliance
• Sprawl and Commuting: Exploring New Measures of United States Metro Regions
• Investigating Sprawl using AIC and Recursive Partitioning Trees: A Machine Learning Approach to Assessing the Association between Poverty and Commute Time
• Converging trend of global urban land expansion sheds new light on sustainable development