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Paul C Sutton - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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a scale adjusted measure of Urban Sprawl using nighttime satellite imagery
Remote Sensing of Environment, 2003Co-Authors: Paul C SuttonAbstract:Abstract “Urban Sprawl” is a growing concern of citizens, environmental organizations, and governments. Negative impacts often attributed to Urban Sprawl are traffic congestion, loss of open space, and increased pollutant runoff into natural waterways. Definitions of “Urban Sprawl” range from local patterns of land use and development to aggregate measures of per capita land consumption for given contiguous Urban areas (UA). This research creates a measure of per capita land use consumption as an aggregate index for the spatially contiguous Urban areas of the conterminous United States with population of 50,000 or greater. Nighttime satellite imagery obtained by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP OLS) is used as a proxy measure of Urban extent. The corresponding population of these Urban areas is derived from a grid of the block group level data from the 1990 U.S. Census. These numbers are used to develop a regression equation between Ln(Urban Area) and Ln(Urban Population). The ‘scale-adjustment’ mentioned in the title characterizes the “Urban Sprawl” of each of the Urban areas by how far above or below they are on the “Sprawl Line” determined by this regression. This “Sprawl Line” allows for a more fair comparison of “Urban Sprawl” between larger and smaller metropolitan areas because a simple measure of per capita land consumption or population density does not account for the natural increase in aggregate population density that occurs as cities grow in population. Cities that have more “Urban Sprawl” by this measure tended to be inland and Midwestern cities such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Atlanta, Dallas–Ft. Worth, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Surprisingly, west coast cities including Los Angeles had some of the lowest levels of “Urban Sprawl” by this measure. There were many low light levels seen in the nighttime imagery around these major Urban areas that were not included in either of the two definitions of Urban extent used in this study. These areas may represent a growing commuter-shed of Urban workers who do not live in the Urban core but nonetheless contribute to many of the impacts typically attributed to “Urban Sprawl”. “Urban Sprawl” is difficult to define precisely partly because public perception of Sprawl is likely derived from local land use planning decisions, spatio-demographic change in growing Urban areas, and changing values and social mores resulting from differential rates of international migration to the Urban areas of the United States. Nonetheless, the aggregate measures derived here are somewhat different than similar previously used measures in that they are ‘scale-adjusted’; also, the spatial patterns of “Urban Sprawl” shown here shed some insight and raise interesting questions about how the dynamics of “Urban Sprawl” are changing.
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A scale-adjusted measure of "Urban Sprawl" using nighttime satellite imagery
Remote Sensing of Environment, 2003Co-Authors: Paul C SuttonAbstract:"Urban Sprawl" is a growing concern of citizens, environmental organizations, and governments. Negative impacts often attributed to Urban Sprawl are traffic congestion, loss of open space, and increased pollutant runoff into natural waterways. Definitions of "Urban Sprawl" range from local patterns of land use and development to aggregate measures of per capita land consumption for given contiguous Urban areas (UA). This research creates a measure of per capita land use consumption as an aggregate index for the spatially contiguous Urban areas of the conterminous United States with population of 50,000 or greater. Nighttime satellite imagery obtained by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP OLS) is used as a proxy measure of Urban extent. The corresponding population of these Urban areas is derived from a grid of the block group level data from the 1990 U.S. Census. These numbers are used to develop a regression equation between Ln(Urban Area) and Ln(Urban Population). The 'scale-adjustment' mentioned in the title characterizes the "Urban Sprawl" of each of the Urban areas by how far above or below they are on the "Sprawl Line" determined by this regression. This "Sprawl Line" allows for a more fair comparison of "Urban Sprawl" between larger and smaller metropolitan areas because a simple measure of per capita land consumption or population density does not account for the natural increase in aggregate population density that occurs as cities grow in population. Cities that have more "Urban Sprawl" by this measure tended to be inland and Midwestern cities such as Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, Dallas-Ft. Worth, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Surprisingly, west coast cities including Los Angeles had some of the lowest levels of "Urban Sprawl" by this measure. There were many low light levels seen in the nighttime imagery around these major Urban areas that were not included in either of the two definitions of Urban extent used in this study. These areas may represent a growing commuter-shed of Urban workers who do not live in the Urban core but nonetheless contribute to many of the impacts typically attributed to "Urban Sprawl". "Urban Sprawl" is difficult to define precisely partly because public perception of Sprawl is likely derived from local land use planning decisions, spatio-demographic change in growing Urban areas, and changing values and social mores resulting from differential rates of international migration to the Urban areas of the United States. Nonetheless, the aggregate measures derived here are somewhat different than similar previously used measures in that they are 'scale-adjusted'; also, the spatial patterns of "Urban Sprawl" shown here shed some insight and raise interesting questions about how the dynamics of "Urban Sprawl" are changing. © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
Jochen A G Jaeger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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How suitable is entropy as a measure of Urban Sprawl
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2019Co-Authors: Naghmeh Nazarnia, Christopher Harding, Jochen A G JaegerAbstract:Abstract Urban Sprawl has found widespread attention among scholars, planners, and policy makers. It has been defined and measured in various ways, and there is still no general agreement on how to measure and control Urban Sprawl and how to prevent its many harmful effects on the natural environment and its negative socio-economic consequences. Entropy has been one of the most often used metrics for the measurement of Urban Sprawl. However, its suitability in terms of requirements for measuring Urban Sprawl has not yet been examined systematically. Therefore, our study examines the behavior and suitability of entropy as a measure of Urban Sprawl by applying it to seven simple model landscapes and six real-world case studies. We also investigate the influence of the choice of the city center and associated translocation of zones and assess entropy with regard to 13 suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl. Our results show that entropy is, in many cases, not sensitive to important differences between spatial patterns of built-up areas that represent different levels of Urban Sprawl, e.g., dispersed vs. compact spatial arrangement of built-up areas. In addition, the value of entropy is strongly affected by changes in the choice of zones within a landscape. Finally, entropy does not meet several important suitability criteria for measuring Urban Sprawl; it only meets 5 out of 13 suitability criteria. We conclude that entropy is not suitable as a measure of Urban Sprawl. More suitable metrics of Urban Sprawl are available that should be used instead.
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Urban Sprawl in Europe. Joint EEA-FOEN report. No 11/2016.
2016Co-Authors: Ernest I. Hennig, Christian Schwick, Felix Kienast, Tomas Soukup, Erika Orlitova, Jochen A G JaegerAbstract:Executive summary Urban Sprawl is associated with a number of ecological, economic and social effects. Some of these relate to people's desires, for example, to live in single-family homes with gardens. However, Urban Sprawl has detrimental and long-lasting effects. For example, Urban Sprawl contributes significantly to the loss of fertile farmland, to soil sealing and to the loss of ecological soil functions. The increase in built-up areas reduces the size of wildlife habitats and increases landscape fragmentation and the spread of invasive species. Urban Sprawl leads to higher greenhouse gas emissions, higher infrastructure costs for transport, water and electrical power, the loss of open landscapes, and the degradation of various ecosystem services. Despite various efforts to address this problem, Urban Sprawl has increased rapidly in Europe in recent decades. Thus, Urban Sprawl presents a major challenge with regard to sustainable land use, as the International Year of Soils 2015 highlighted. Sprawl is a result not only of population growth but also of lifestyles that take up more space. Accordingly, Urban Sprawl has increased even in regions with a declining human population. Many more Urban development and transport infrastructure projects are planned for the future, in particular in the European Union (EU) Member States which joined after 2004. Consequently, further increases in Urban Sprawl in the future will be significant. Therefore, consistent data on the degree of Urban Sprawl are needed, particularly data that are suitable for the comparison of regions across Europe. This report investigates the degree of Urban Sprawl in 32 countries in Europe by considering two points in time (2006 and 2009) at three levels. The three levels include the country level, the NUTS-2 region level (based on the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS)) and the 1-km2 cell level (based on the Land and Ecosystem Accounting (LEAC) grid). The comparison of two points in time allowed an assessment of temporal changes in Urban Sprawl. This report applies the method of 'weighted Urban proliferation' (WUP), which quantifies the degree of Urban Sprawl for any given landscape through a combination of three components: (1) the size of the built-up areas; (2) the spatial configuration (dispersion) of the built-up areas in the landscape; and (3) the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job. The report provides, for the first time, an assessment of Urban Sprawl in all EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries using the WUP method. The Urban Sprawl values obtained cover a large range, from low values for large parts of Scandinavia ( 4 UPU/m2) and very high values for large parts of western and central Europe (> 6 UPU/m2). The two largest clusters of high-Sprawl values in Europe are located in (1) north-eastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and part of western Germany; and (2) in the United Kingdom between London and the Midlands. The analysis of Sprawl at the 1-km2-grid level shows that Sprawl is most pronounced in wide rings around city centres, along large transport corridors, and along many coastlines (particularly in the Mediterranean countries). The lowest levels of Sprawl are mainly associated with mountain ranges or remote areas. The level of Sprawl, as measured by WUP, increased in all European countries between 2006 and 2009. The overall WUP value for Europe (all 32 countries combined) increased from 1.56 Urban permeation units (UPU)/m2 in 2006 to 1.64 UPU/m2 in 2009, that is by 5 % in 3 years or by 1.7 % per year. In most countries, the increase was higher than 1 % per year, and in many countries WUP increased by more than 2 % per year. This was also the case for most NUTS-2 regions. Future studies using additional time-points will allow more detailed temporal comparisons. Base data for 2012 will be available in 2016 and these could be analysed in a follow-up project. Driving forces and predictive models of Urban Sprawl The level of Urban Sprawl is largely a function of socio-economic and demographic drivers, and the geophysical context. Current levels of Urban Sprawl need to be interpreted within the context of regional socio-economic and geophysical conditions. Therefore, the second part of this study investigated the potential factors that may contribute to an increase or decrease in the degree of Urban Sprawl, and determined their relative importance. The report applied a set of statistical models to determine which of these factors drive the process of Urban Sprawl in Europe. We analysed the statistical relationships between Urban Sprawl and a range of explanatory variables (14 variables at the country level and 12 at the NUTS-2 level). We also applied these relationships to predict the expected Sprawl values for all regions in our study area and compared actual values with predicted values. Most of our hypotheses about the likely driving forces of Urban Sprawl were confirmed by the statistical analyses. The relevant variables identified as affecting Urban Sprawl are population density, road density, railway density, household size, governmental effectiveness, the number of cars per 1 000 inhabitants and two environmental factors (i.e. net primary production and relief energy). This result was consistent for both of the years (2006 and 2009) considered in the analysis. The results indicate that economic development has, largely, not been decoupled from increases in Urban Sprawl. A high amount of variation in the level of Urban Sprawl, as measured by WUP, was explained by the predictor variables: 72–80 % at the country level and 80–81 % at the NUTS-2 level. The variation explained for the three components of WUP ranged between 67 % and 94 % at the NUTS-2 level. Efforts to control Urban Sprawl should take these driving forces into account. Relevance for monitoring and policymaking The results provided by this study are intended to contribute to more sustainable political decision- making and planning throughout Europe. In the last 15 years (2000–2015), several projects and programmes at the European level have proposed a suite of concepts and measures to address Urban Sprawl and promote more sustainable land use. The most recent (2014), and perhaps most important, of these is the Seventh Environment Action Programme (7EAP), which calls for indicators of resource efficiency to be established in order to guide public and private decision-makers. Although the urgent challenge presented by Urban Sprawl has been recognised, there is still no monitoring in place for European Urban Sprawl. This report aims to help close this gap. The results confirm the conclusion of earlier reports (e.g. EEA, 2006a; EEA, 2006b) namely that there is an increasingly urgent need for action. Large discrepancies between the predicted and observed levels of Urban Sprawl provide a basis for identifying areas for prioritising management action. Our data also provide a basis for scenarios regarding the future development of Urban Sprawl in Europe. There is an increasing need and interest in including indicators of Urban Sprawl in systems for monitoring sustainable development, the state of the environment, biodiversity and landscape quality. The results presented in this report are intended for this purpose and can be updated on a regular basis in order to detect trends in Urban Sprawl. This report also demonstrates the usefulness of the WUP method as a tool for Urban and regional planning and for performance review based on benchmarks, targets and limits. This study provides a comparable measurement of Urban Sprawl for most of the European continent using a consistent data set across Europe. The results will support managers and policymakers with the allocation of resources for the better protection of agricultural soils and landscape quality, and more sustainable political decision-making related to land use. The report also identifies the most immediate priorities and future research needs.
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improving the measurement of Urban Sprawl weighted Urban proliferation wup and its application to switzerland
Ecological Indicators, 2014Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Christian SchwickAbstract:Abstract Growing Urban Sprawl is a serious concern worldwide for a number of environmental and economic reasons and is a major challenge on the way to sustainable land use. To address this increasing problem, there is an urgent need for quantitative measurement. Every meaningful method to measure the degree of Urban Sprawl needs to be based on a clear definition of “Urban Sprawl” disentangling causes and consequences of Urban Sprawl from the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl itself, as Urban Sprawl has differing causes and consequences in different regions and regulatory contexts. Weighted Urban Proliferation (WUP) – the novel method presented in this paper – is based on the following definition of Urban Sprawl: the more area built over in a given landscape (amount of built-up area) and the more dispersed this built-up area in the landscape (spatial configuration), and the higher the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job (lower utilization intensity in the built-up area), the higher the degree of Urban Sprawl. However, there is a lack of reliable measures of Urban Sprawl that integrate these three dimensions in a single metric. Therefore, these three independent dimensions need to be combined according to the qualitative assessment of Sprawl to create a suitable metric – which is exactly what the WUP metric does using two weighting functions. Switzerland serves as an example of applying this method to examine the current state, for comparisons among regions, for historical analysis, and for assessing planning scenarios. The degree of Urban Sprawl in Switzerland increased by 155% between 1935 and 2002, and without rigorous measures, scenarios of future Urban Sprawl show that it is likely to further increase by more than 50% until 2050. Examples from parts of Switzerland demonstrate that Sprawl can be reduced. As a consequence of intense public discussion, the Swiss Spatial Planning Act was revised in 2013 to make it tighter. We conclude that the new method is more suitable than previous methods to quantify the indicator “Urban Sprawl” in monitoring systems, e.g., it has now been implemented in monitoring systems in Switzerland. The new WUP method is highly suitable for performance control of limits to Urban Sprawl once they are implemented and for application to other countries around the globe.
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suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl
Ecological Indicators, 2010Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Rene Bertiller, Christian Schwick, Felix KienastAbstract:Abstract Rapid increase of Urban Sprawl in many countries worldwide has become a major concern because of its detrimental effects on the environment. Existing measures of Urban Sprawl suffer from a confusing variety of differing, and sometimes contradictory, interpretations of the term “Urban Sprawl”. Therefore, results from different studies cannot usually be compared to each other and are difficult to interpret consistently. Every meaningful method to measure the degree of Urban Sprawl needs to be based on a clear definition of “Urban Sprawl” disentangling causes and consequences of Urban Sprawl from the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl itself, as Urban Sprawl has differing causes and consequences in different regions and regulatory contexts. This paper contributes to the development of more reliable measures of Urban Sprawl by providing clarifications to the definition of “Urban Sprawl” and by developing a set of 13 suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl. Our study proceeds in three steps. First, it proposes a clear definition of Urban Sprawl that is based on an evaluation of existing Urban Sprawl definitions. Second, it derives from this definition 13 suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl. These criteria are useful to systematically evaluate the consistency and reliability of existing and future metrics of Urban Sprawl. The 13 criteria include (1) intuitive interpretation, (2) mathematical simplicity, (3) modest data requirements, (4) low sensitivity to very small patches of Urban area, (5) monotonous response to increases in Urban area, (6) monotonous response to increasing distance between two Urban patches when within the scale of analysis, (7) monotonous response to increased spreading of three Urban patches, (8) same direction of the metric's responses to the processes in criteria 5, 6 and 7, (9) continuous response to the merging of two Urban patches, (10) independence of the metric from the location of the pattern of Urban patches within the reporting unit, (11) continuous response to increasing distance between two Urban patches when they move beyond the scale of analysis, (12) mathematical homogeneity (i.e., intensive or extensive measure), and (13) additivity (i.e., additive or area-proportionately additive measure). Third, we illustrate the application of the 13 criteria by systematically assessing three existing measures of Urban Sprawl. We conclude that suitability criteria help understand the behavior of metrics intended to measure Urban Sprawl and to identify the most suitable measures. This article is the first part of a set of two papers.
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Urban permeation of landscapes and Sprawl per capita new measures of Urban Sprawl
Ecological Indicators, 2010Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Rene Bertiller, Christian Schwick, Duncan Cavens, Felix KienastAbstract:A B S T R A C T Urban Sprawl (dispersed Urban development) has increased at alarming rates in Europe and North America over the last 50 years. Quantitative data are urgently needed in monitoring systems for sustainable development. However, there is a lack of reliable measures of Urban Sprawl that take into account the spatial configuration of the Urban areas (not just total amount). This paper introduces four new measures of Urban Sprawl: degree of Urban dispersion (DIS), total Sprawl (TS), degree of Urban permeation of the landscape (UP), and Sprawl per capita (SPC). They characterize Urban Sprawl from a geometric point of view. The measures are related through TS = DIS ! Urban area, UP = TS/size of the landscape studied, and SPC = TS/number of inhabitants. The paper investigates the properties of the new measures systematically using 13 suitability criteria which were derived from a clear definition of Urban Sprawl as discussed in a previous paper. The scale of analysis is specified by the so-called horizon of perception. Second, the new measures are applied to threeexamplesfromSwitzerland.Subsequently,themeasuresarebrieflycomparedtoothermeasuresof Urban Sprawl from the literature. We demonstrate that UP is an intensive and area-proportionately additivemeasure andissuitableforcomparingUrban Sprawlamong regionsofdifferingsize, whileSPCis most appropriate when comparing Sprawl in relation to human population density. The paper also provides practical advice for calculating the new measures. We conclude that the new method is more suitable than previous methods to quantify the indicator ‘‘Urban Sprawl’’ in monitoring systems as this method distinguishes the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl from its various causes and consequences. This article is part II of a set of two papers.
Felix Kienast - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Urban Sprawl in Europe. Joint EEA-FOEN report. No 11/2016.
2016Co-Authors: Ernest I. Hennig, Christian Schwick, Felix Kienast, Tomas Soukup, Erika Orlitova, Jochen A G JaegerAbstract:Executive summary Urban Sprawl is associated with a number of ecological, economic and social effects. Some of these relate to people's desires, for example, to live in single-family homes with gardens. However, Urban Sprawl has detrimental and long-lasting effects. For example, Urban Sprawl contributes significantly to the loss of fertile farmland, to soil sealing and to the loss of ecological soil functions. The increase in built-up areas reduces the size of wildlife habitats and increases landscape fragmentation and the spread of invasive species. Urban Sprawl leads to higher greenhouse gas emissions, higher infrastructure costs for transport, water and electrical power, the loss of open landscapes, and the degradation of various ecosystem services. Despite various efforts to address this problem, Urban Sprawl has increased rapidly in Europe in recent decades. Thus, Urban Sprawl presents a major challenge with regard to sustainable land use, as the International Year of Soils 2015 highlighted. Sprawl is a result not only of population growth but also of lifestyles that take up more space. Accordingly, Urban Sprawl has increased even in regions with a declining human population. Many more Urban development and transport infrastructure projects are planned for the future, in particular in the European Union (EU) Member States which joined after 2004. Consequently, further increases in Urban Sprawl in the future will be significant. Therefore, consistent data on the degree of Urban Sprawl are needed, particularly data that are suitable for the comparison of regions across Europe. This report investigates the degree of Urban Sprawl in 32 countries in Europe by considering two points in time (2006 and 2009) at three levels. The three levels include the country level, the NUTS-2 region level (based on the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS)) and the 1-km2 cell level (based on the Land and Ecosystem Accounting (LEAC) grid). The comparison of two points in time allowed an assessment of temporal changes in Urban Sprawl. This report applies the method of 'weighted Urban proliferation' (WUP), which quantifies the degree of Urban Sprawl for any given landscape through a combination of three components: (1) the size of the built-up areas; (2) the spatial configuration (dispersion) of the built-up areas in the landscape; and (3) the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job. The report provides, for the first time, an assessment of Urban Sprawl in all EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries using the WUP method. The Urban Sprawl values obtained cover a large range, from low values for large parts of Scandinavia ( 4 UPU/m2) and very high values for large parts of western and central Europe (> 6 UPU/m2). The two largest clusters of high-Sprawl values in Europe are located in (1) north-eastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and part of western Germany; and (2) in the United Kingdom between London and the Midlands. The analysis of Sprawl at the 1-km2-grid level shows that Sprawl is most pronounced in wide rings around city centres, along large transport corridors, and along many coastlines (particularly in the Mediterranean countries). The lowest levels of Sprawl are mainly associated with mountain ranges or remote areas. The level of Sprawl, as measured by WUP, increased in all European countries between 2006 and 2009. The overall WUP value for Europe (all 32 countries combined) increased from 1.56 Urban permeation units (UPU)/m2 in 2006 to 1.64 UPU/m2 in 2009, that is by 5 % in 3 years or by 1.7 % per year. In most countries, the increase was higher than 1 % per year, and in many countries WUP increased by more than 2 % per year. This was also the case for most NUTS-2 regions. Future studies using additional time-points will allow more detailed temporal comparisons. Base data for 2012 will be available in 2016 and these could be analysed in a follow-up project. Driving forces and predictive models of Urban Sprawl The level of Urban Sprawl is largely a function of socio-economic and demographic drivers, and the geophysical context. Current levels of Urban Sprawl need to be interpreted within the context of regional socio-economic and geophysical conditions. Therefore, the second part of this study investigated the potential factors that may contribute to an increase or decrease in the degree of Urban Sprawl, and determined their relative importance. The report applied a set of statistical models to determine which of these factors drive the process of Urban Sprawl in Europe. We analysed the statistical relationships between Urban Sprawl and a range of explanatory variables (14 variables at the country level and 12 at the NUTS-2 level). We also applied these relationships to predict the expected Sprawl values for all regions in our study area and compared actual values with predicted values. Most of our hypotheses about the likely driving forces of Urban Sprawl were confirmed by the statistical analyses. The relevant variables identified as affecting Urban Sprawl are population density, road density, railway density, household size, governmental effectiveness, the number of cars per 1 000 inhabitants and two environmental factors (i.e. net primary production and relief energy). This result was consistent for both of the years (2006 and 2009) considered in the analysis. The results indicate that economic development has, largely, not been decoupled from increases in Urban Sprawl. A high amount of variation in the level of Urban Sprawl, as measured by WUP, was explained by the predictor variables: 72–80 % at the country level and 80–81 % at the NUTS-2 level. The variation explained for the three components of WUP ranged between 67 % and 94 % at the NUTS-2 level. Efforts to control Urban Sprawl should take these driving forces into account. Relevance for monitoring and policymaking The results provided by this study are intended to contribute to more sustainable political decision- making and planning throughout Europe. In the last 15 years (2000–2015), several projects and programmes at the European level have proposed a suite of concepts and measures to address Urban Sprawl and promote more sustainable land use. The most recent (2014), and perhaps most important, of these is the Seventh Environment Action Programme (7EAP), which calls for indicators of resource efficiency to be established in order to guide public and private decision-makers. Although the urgent challenge presented by Urban Sprawl has been recognised, there is still no monitoring in place for European Urban Sprawl. This report aims to help close this gap. The results confirm the conclusion of earlier reports (e.g. EEA, 2006a; EEA, 2006b) namely that there is an increasingly urgent need for action. Large discrepancies between the predicted and observed levels of Urban Sprawl provide a basis for identifying areas for prioritising management action. Our data also provide a basis for scenarios regarding the future development of Urban Sprawl in Europe. There is an increasing need and interest in including indicators of Urban Sprawl in systems for monitoring sustainable development, the state of the environment, biodiversity and landscape quality. The results presented in this report are intended for this purpose and can be updated on a regular basis in order to detect trends in Urban Sprawl. This report also demonstrates the usefulness of the WUP method as a tool for Urban and regional planning and for performance review based on benchmarks, targets and limits. This study provides a comparable measurement of Urban Sprawl for most of the European continent using a consistent data set across Europe. The results will support managers and policymakers with the allocation of resources for the better protection of agricultural soils and landscape quality, and more sustainable political decision-making related to land use. The report also identifies the most immediate priorities and future research needs.
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suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl
Ecological Indicators, 2010Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Rene Bertiller, Christian Schwick, Felix KienastAbstract:Abstract Rapid increase of Urban Sprawl in many countries worldwide has become a major concern because of its detrimental effects on the environment. Existing measures of Urban Sprawl suffer from a confusing variety of differing, and sometimes contradictory, interpretations of the term “Urban Sprawl”. Therefore, results from different studies cannot usually be compared to each other and are difficult to interpret consistently. Every meaningful method to measure the degree of Urban Sprawl needs to be based on a clear definition of “Urban Sprawl” disentangling causes and consequences of Urban Sprawl from the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl itself, as Urban Sprawl has differing causes and consequences in different regions and regulatory contexts. This paper contributes to the development of more reliable measures of Urban Sprawl by providing clarifications to the definition of “Urban Sprawl” and by developing a set of 13 suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl. Our study proceeds in three steps. First, it proposes a clear definition of Urban Sprawl that is based on an evaluation of existing Urban Sprawl definitions. Second, it derives from this definition 13 suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl. These criteria are useful to systematically evaluate the consistency and reliability of existing and future metrics of Urban Sprawl. The 13 criteria include (1) intuitive interpretation, (2) mathematical simplicity, (3) modest data requirements, (4) low sensitivity to very small patches of Urban area, (5) monotonous response to increases in Urban area, (6) monotonous response to increasing distance between two Urban patches when within the scale of analysis, (7) monotonous response to increased spreading of three Urban patches, (8) same direction of the metric's responses to the processes in criteria 5, 6 and 7, (9) continuous response to the merging of two Urban patches, (10) independence of the metric from the location of the pattern of Urban patches within the reporting unit, (11) continuous response to increasing distance between two Urban patches when they move beyond the scale of analysis, (12) mathematical homogeneity (i.e., intensive or extensive measure), and (13) additivity (i.e., additive or area-proportionately additive measure). Third, we illustrate the application of the 13 criteria by systematically assessing three existing measures of Urban Sprawl. We conclude that suitability criteria help understand the behavior of metrics intended to measure Urban Sprawl and to identify the most suitable measures. This article is the first part of a set of two papers.
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Urban permeation of landscapes and Sprawl per capita new measures of Urban Sprawl
Ecological Indicators, 2010Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Rene Bertiller, Christian Schwick, Duncan Cavens, Felix KienastAbstract:A B S T R A C T Urban Sprawl (dispersed Urban development) has increased at alarming rates in Europe and North America over the last 50 years. Quantitative data are urgently needed in monitoring systems for sustainable development. However, there is a lack of reliable measures of Urban Sprawl that take into account the spatial configuration of the Urban areas (not just total amount). This paper introduces four new measures of Urban Sprawl: degree of Urban dispersion (DIS), total Sprawl (TS), degree of Urban permeation of the landscape (UP), and Sprawl per capita (SPC). They characterize Urban Sprawl from a geometric point of view. The measures are related through TS = DIS ! Urban area, UP = TS/size of the landscape studied, and SPC = TS/number of inhabitants. The paper investigates the properties of the new measures systematically using 13 suitability criteria which were derived from a clear definition of Urban Sprawl as discussed in a previous paper. The scale of analysis is specified by the so-called horizon of perception. Second, the new measures are applied to threeexamplesfromSwitzerland.Subsequently,themeasuresarebrieflycomparedtoothermeasuresof Urban Sprawl from the literature. We demonstrate that UP is an intensive and area-proportionately additivemeasure andissuitableforcomparingUrban Sprawlamong regionsofdifferingsize, whileSPCis most appropriate when comparing Sprawl in relation to human population density. The paper also provides practical advice for calculating the new measures. We conclude that the new method is more suitable than previous methods to quantify the indicator ‘‘Urban Sprawl’’ in monitoring systems as this method distinguishes the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl from its various causes and consequences. This article is part II of a set of two papers.
Christian Schwick - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Urban Sprawl in Europe. Joint EEA-FOEN report. No 11/2016.
2016Co-Authors: Ernest I. Hennig, Christian Schwick, Felix Kienast, Tomas Soukup, Erika Orlitova, Jochen A G JaegerAbstract:Executive summary Urban Sprawl is associated with a number of ecological, economic and social effects. Some of these relate to people's desires, for example, to live in single-family homes with gardens. However, Urban Sprawl has detrimental and long-lasting effects. For example, Urban Sprawl contributes significantly to the loss of fertile farmland, to soil sealing and to the loss of ecological soil functions. The increase in built-up areas reduces the size of wildlife habitats and increases landscape fragmentation and the spread of invasive species. Urban Sprawl leads to higher greenhouse gas emissions, higher infrastructure costs for transport, water and electrical power, the loss of open landscapes, and the degradation of various ecosystem services. Despite various efforts to address this problem, Urban Sprawl has increased rapidly in Europe in recent decades. Thus, Urban Sprawl presents a major challenge with regard to sustainable land use, as the International Year of Soils 2015 highlighted. Sprawl is a result not only of population growth but also of lifestyles that take up more space. Accordingly, Urban Sprawl has increased even in regions with a declining human population. Many more Urban development and transport infrastructure projects are planned for the future, in particular in the European Union (EU) Member States which joined after 2004. Consequently, further increases in Urban Sprawl in the future will be significant. Therefore, consistent data on the degree of Urban Sprawl are needed, particularly data that are suitable for the comparison of regions across Europe. This report investigates the degree of Urban Sprawl in 32 countries in Europe by considering two points in time (2006 and 2009) at three levels. The three levels include the country level, the NUTS-2 region level (based on the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS)) and the 1-km2 cell level (based on the Land and Ecosystem Accounting (LEAC) grid). The comparison of two points in time allowed an assessment of temporal changes in Urban Sprawl. This report applies the method of 'weighted Urban proliferation' (WUP), which quantifies the degree of Urban Sprawl for any given landscape through a combination of three components: (1) the size of the built-up areas; (2) the spatial configuration (dispersion) of the built-up areas in the landscape; and (3) the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job. The report provides, for the first time, an assessment of Urban Sprawl in all EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries using the WUP method. The Urban Sprawl values obtained cover a large range, from low values for large parts of Scandinavia ( 4 UPU/m2) and very high values for large parts of western and central Europe (> 6 UPU/m2). The two largest clusters of high-Sprawl values in Europe are located in (1) north-eastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and part of western Germany; and (2) in the United Kingdom between London and the Midlands. The analysis of Sprawl at the 1-km2-grid level shows that Sprawl is most pronounced in wide rings around city centres, along large transport corridors, and along many coastlines (particularly in the Mediterranean countries). The lowest levels of Sprawl are mainly associated with mountain ranges or remote areas. The level of Sprawl, as measured by WUP, increased in all European countries between 2006 and 2009. The overall WUP value for Europe (all 32 countries combined) increased from 1.56 Urban permeation units (UPU)/m2 in 2006 to 1.64 UPU/m2 in 2009, that is by 5 % in 3 years or by 1.7 % per year. In most countries, the increase was higher than 1 % per year, and in many countries WUP increased by more than 2 % per year. This was also the case for most NUTS-2 regions. Future studies using additional time-points will allow more detailed temporal comparisons. Base data for 2012 will be available in 2016 and these could be analysed in a follow-up project. Driving forces and predictive models of Urban Sprawl The level of Urban Sprawl is largely a function of socio-economic and demographic drivers, and the geophysical context. Current levels of Urban Sprawl need to be interpreted within the context of regional socio-economic and geophysical conditions. Therefore, the second part of this study investigated the potential factors that may contribute to an increase or decrease in the degree of Urban Sprawl, and determined their relative importance. The report applied a set of statistical models to determine which of these factors drive the process of Urban Sprawl in Europe. We analysed the statistical relationships between Urban Sprawl and a range of explanatory variables (14 variables at the country level and 12 at the NUTS-2 level). We also applied these relationships to predict the expected Sprawl values for all regions in our study area and compared actual values with predicted values. Most of our hypotheses about the likely driving forces of Urban Sprawl were confirmed by the statistical analyses. The relevant variables identified as affecting Urban Sprawl are population density, road density, railway density, household size, governmental effectiveness, the number of cars per 1 000 inhabitants and two environmental factors (i.e. net primary production and relief energy). This result was consistent for both of the years (2006 and 2009) considered in the analysis. The results indicate that economic development has, largely, not been decoupled from increases in Urban Sprawl. A high amount of variation in the level of Urban Sprawl, as measured by WUP, was explained by the predictor variables: 72–80 % at the country level and 80–81 % at the NUTS-2 level. The variation explained for the three components of WUP ranged between 67 % and 94 % at the NUTS-2 level. Efforts to control Urban Sprawl should take these driving forces into account. Relevance for monitoring and policymaking The results provided by this study are intended to contribute to more sustainable political decision- making and planning throughout Europe. In the last 15 years (2000–2015), several projects and programmes at the European level have proposed a suite of concepts and measures to address Urban Sprawl and promote more sustainable land use. The most recent (2014), and perhaps most important, of these is the Seventh Environment Action Programme (7EAP), which calls for indicators of resource efficiency to be established in order to guide public and private decision-makers. Although the urgent challenge presented by Urban Sprawl has been recognised, there is still no monitoring in place for European Urban Sprawl. This report aims to help close this gap. The results confirm the conclusion of earlier reports (e.g. EEA, 2006a; EEA, 2006b) namely that there is an increasingly urgent need for action. Large discrepancies between the predicted and observed levels of Urban Sprawl provide a basis for identifying areas for prioritising management action. Our data also provide a basis for scenarios regarding the future development of Urban Sprawl in Europe. There is an increasing need and interest in including indicators of Urban Sprawl in systems for monitoring sustainable development, the state of the environment, biodiversity and landscape quality. The results presented in this report are intended for this purpose and can be updated on a regular basis in order to detect trends in Urban Sprawl. This report also demonstrates the usefulness of the WUP method as a tool for Urban and regional planning and for performance review based on benchmarks, targets and limits. This study provides a comparable measurement of Urban Sprawl for most of the European continent using a consistent data set across Europe. The results will support managers and policymakers with the allocation of resources for the better protection of agricultural soils and landscape quality, and more sustainable political decision-making related to land use. The report also identifies the most immediate priorities and future research needs.
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improving the measurement of Urban Sprawl weighted Urban proliferation wup and its application to switzerland
Ecological Indicators, 2014Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Christian SchwickAbstract:Abstract Growing Urban Sprawl is a serious concern worldwide for a number of environmental and economic reasons and is a major challenge on the way to sustainable land use. To address this increasing problem, there is an urgent need for quantitative measurement. Every meaningful method to measure the degree of Urban Sprawl needs to be based on a clear definition of “Urban Sprawl” disentangling causes and consequences of Urban Sprawl from the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl itself, as Urban Sprawl has differing causes and consequences in different regions and regulatory contexts. Weighted Urban Proliferation (WUP) – the novel method presented in this paper – is based on the following definition of Urban Sprawl: the more area built over in a given landscape (amount of built-up area) and the more dispersed this built-up area in the landscape (spatial configuration), and the higher the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job (lower utilization intensity in the built-up area), the higher the degree of Urban Sprawl. However, there is a lack of reliable measures of Urban Sprawl that integrate these three dimensions in a single metric. Therefore, these three independent dimensions need to be combined according to the qualitative assessment of Sprawl to create a suitable metric – which is exactly what the WUP metric does using two weighting functions. Switzerland serves as an example of applying this method to examine the current state, for comparisons among regions, for historical analysis, and for assessing planning scenarios. The degree of Urban Sprawl in Switzerland increased by 155% between 1935 and 2002, and without rigorous measures, scenarios of future Urban Sprawl show that it is likely to further increase by more than 50% until 2050. Examples from parts of Switzerland demonstrate that Sprawl can be reduced. As a consequence of intense public discussion, the Swiss Spatial Planning Act was revised in 2013 to make it tighter. We conclude that the new method is more suitable than previous methods to quantify the indicator “Urban Sprawl” in monitoring systems, e.g., it has now been implemented in monitoring systems in Switzerland. The new WUP method is highly suitable for performance control of limits to Urban Sprawl once they are implemented and for application to other countries around the globe.
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suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl
Ecological Indicators, 2010Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Rene Bertiller, Christian Schwick, Felix KienastAbstract:Abstract Rapid increase of Urban Sprawl in many countries worldwide has become a major concern because of its detrimental effects on the environment. Existing measures of Urban Sprawl suffer from a confusing variety of differing, and sometimes contradictory, interpretations of the term “Urban Sprawl”. Therefore, results from different studies cannot usually be compared to each other and are difficult to interpret consistently. Every meaningful method to measure the degree of Urban Sprawl needs to be based on a clear definition of “Urban Sprawl” disentangling causes and consequences of Urban Sprawl from the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl itself, as Urban Sprawl has differing causes and consequences in different regions and regulatory contexts. This paper contributes to the development of more reliable measures of Urban Sprawl by providing clarifications to the definition of “Urban Sprawl” and by developing a set of 13 suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl. Our study proceeds in three steps. First, it proposes a clear definition of Urban Sprawl that is based on an evaluation of existing Urban Sprawl definitions. Second, it derives from this definition 13 suitability criteria for measures of Urban Sprawl. These criteria are useful to systematically evaluate the consistency and reliability of existing and future metrics of Urban Sprawl. The 13 criteria include (1) intuitive interpretation, (2) mathematical simplicity, (3) modest data requirements, (4) low sensitivity to very small patches of Urban area, (5) monotonous response to increases in Urban area, (6) monotonous response to increasing distance between two Urban patches when within the scale of analysis, (7) monotonous response to increased spreading of three Urban patches, (8) same direction of the metric's responses to the processes in criteria 5, 6 and 7, (9) continuous response to the merging of two Urban patches, (10) independence of the metric from the location of the pattern of Urban patches within the reporting unit, (11) continuous response to increasing distance between two Urban patches when they move beyond the scale of analysis, (12) mathematical homogeneity (i.e., intensive or extensive measure), and (13) additivity (i.e., additive or area-proportionately additive measure). Third, we illustrate the application of the 13 criteria by systematically assessing three existing measures of Urban Sprawl. We conclude that suitability criteria help understand the behavior of metrics intended to measure Urban Sprawl and to identify the most suitable measures. This article is the first part of a set of two papers.
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Urban permeation of landscapes and Sprawl per capita new measures of Urban Sprawl
Ecological Indicators, 2010Co-Authors: Jochen A G Jaeger, Rene Bertiller, Christian Schwick, Duncan Cavens, Felix KienastAbstract:A B S T R A C T Urban Sprawl (dispersed Urban development) has increased at alarming rates in Europe and North America over the last 50 years. Quantitative data are urgently needed in monitoring systems for sustainable development. However, there is a lack of reliable measures of Urban Sprawl that take into account the spatial configuration of the Urban areas (not just total amount). This paper introduces four new measures of Urban Sprawl: degree of Urban dispersion (DIS), total Sprawl (TS), degree of Urban permeation of the landscape (UP), and Sprawl per capita (SPC). They characterize Urban Sprawl from a geometric point of view. The measures are related through TS = DIS ! Urban area, UP = TS/size of the landscape studied, and SPC = TS/number of inhabitants. The paper investigates the properties of the new measures systematically using 13 suitability criteria which were derived from a clear definition of Urban Sprawl as discussed in a previous paper. The scale of analysis is specified by the so-called horizon of perception. Second, the new measures are applied to threeexamplesfromSwitzerland.Subsequently,themeasuresarebrieflycomparedtoothermeasuresof Urban Sprawl from the literature. We demonstrate that UP is an intensive and area-proportionately additivemeasure andissuitableforcomparingUrban Sprawlamong regionsofdifferingsize, whileSPCis most appropriate when comparing Sprawl in relation to human population density. The paper also provides practical advice for calculating the new measures. We conclude that the new method is more suitable than previous methods to quantify the indicator ‘‘Urban Sprawl’’ in monitoring systems as this method distinguishes the phenomenon of Urban Sprawl from its various causes and consequences. This article is part II of a set of two papers.
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Urban Sprawl measurement from remote sensing data
Applied Geography, 2010Co-Authors: B Bhatta, S Saraswati, D BandyopadhyayAbstract:Abstract Conceptual ambiguity of Sprawl and lack of consensus among researchers have made the measurement of Urban Sprawl very difficult, especially from remote sensing data. There are many scales and parameters that are in use to quantify the Sprawl; however, many of them are suffered from several limitations. The objective of this article is to document and discuss these Sprawl measurement techniques along with their merits and demerits towards the absolute acceptance or rejection. The paper also highlights the scope and direction of future research for the measurement of Urban Sprawl.
