Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Consider two examples: the advocacy organizations Smart
Growth America and The Cato Institute. Smart Growth America
is an advocacy organization self-described as ''a nationwide coali-
tion promoting a better way to grow: one that protects farmland
and open space, revitalizes neighborhoods, keeps housing afford-
able, and provides more transportation choices'' (Smart Growth
America, 2009). The organization also commissions research on
sprawl. Their assessments of sprawl (e.g., Ewing, Pendall and
Chen, 2002) are based on a positive vision of what constitutes
good urban development. On the other end of the spectrum, the
Cato Institute, a free market advocacy organization that seeks
to ''increase the understanding of public policies based on the
principles of limited government, free markets, individual liberty,
and peace'' (Cato Institute, 2009). This institute also selects its
own characteristics of what constitutes good urban development
based on their ideological world view (Gordon and Richardson,
2000). As can be assumed, the reports produced by each organi-
zation, produced by reputable scholars, advocate two opposing
views on sprawl, how it should be measured, its impact and its
policy implications.
remote sensing because they depend on data other than remotely
sensed data to measure them.
2
12.2.4
Sprawl redux: focusing on the
concerns of remote sensing experts
Of these definitions, we believe that the characteristics around
which we can extract the most objective information, spatial char-
acteristics of urban growth, are of particular concern to remote
sensing experts. Therefore, for the remainder of this chapter, we
focus on those definitions of sprawl that are physical - spatial in
nature, e.g., low density building along the edges of an urban
center, tracts of single land use types (e.g. separation of resi-
dential, employment and commercial centers), or development
not contiguous to existing built-up areas. The distribution of
such development should be measured at the neighborhood,
metropolitan and regional level, as definitions of sprawl vary
depending on spatial scale. These are characteristics that can
be readily measured by remote sensing experts (Hasse, 2007,
Martinuzzi, Gould and Ramos Gonzalez, 2007; Bhatta, Saraswati
and Bandyopadhyay, 2010), and their quantification is of utmost
importance in tracking sprawl over time.
The questions of whether or not these spatial characteristics
are good or bad, whether they are caused by particular processes
and whether they lead to particular desired or undesired environ-
mental, economic or social processes are left aside at this point.
The spatial measurements described later in the text provide a
crucial foundation of data on which to build further analyses,
and they are characteristics that can be derived through remotely
sensed data and quantified.
12.2.3
Definitions according to the
social and/or economic processes
that give rise to particular urban
spatial development patterns
Research suggests that socioeconomic trends may lead to the
aforementioned characteristics of spatial development, and thus
these trends are included in the definition of sprawl. Some
research defines sprawl processes as characterized by the flight of
stronger income classes away from the urban center and towards
the urban fringe (Ewing, Pendall and Chen, 2002), and the decline
of city centers (van den Berg
et al
., 1982, Mills and Hamilton,
1994; Golledge and Stimson, 1997). The flight of economically
strong populations and retail businesses that leave for fringe areas
in search of more lax building regulations and/or preferable tax
remission lead to a severe decline in the municipal tax base of the
region from where they came (Hadly, 2000). Squires and Kubrin
(2005), consider urban sprawl to operate simultaneously with
concentration of poverty and racial segregation, where sprawl is
catalyzed by and catalyzes socioeconomic and racial segregation.
Other researchers discuss sprawl as a result of lack of integrated
land-use planning (Burchell
et al
., 1998).
On the other hand, social and economic processes leading
to sprawl are sometimes couched in positive terms, as when
decentralization of employment and population is considered a
desirable process (Glaeser and Kahn, 2004). Sprawl has been also
described as the inevitable result of increased mobility due to
an automobile-based transportation system (Glaeser and Kahn,
2004), the logical response of markets to consumer demand
(Gordon and Richardson, 1997), or possibly as an expression of
efficiency maximization among multiple economic players (Batty
and Longley, 1994).
Again, the processes emphasized by the various researchers
and/or advocates often reflect their ideological disposition. Either
way, these definitions are less relevant to a volume on urban
12.3
Historic forms of
`` urban sprawl´´
To understand the origins of the particular form of urban spatial
development described as sprawl, we consider two major points
in the history of modern urban development when profound
demographic, urban and spatial changes were taking place. The
first period was the industrial revolution of the 19th century.
This period was marked by the massive migration from rural
areas to industrial cities and their transformation into centers of
activities, primarily in Europe. The period was also characterized
by the massive immigration from Europe to the core cities in
the United States, leading to an out-migration of the middle and
upper classes out of the cities to the urban fringe (Paddison,
2001). Following the industrialization of cities and rapid rise in
population densities, the quality of life in cities fell and people
romanticized for life in the adjoining open spaces. The squalid
conditions that developed in these major industrial cities gave
rise to zoning reforms in cities and to suburban development
outside of them (Gillham, 2002). From the mid-1800s in the
2
It is possible to measure some of these socio-economic phenomena spatially
through proxies (e.g. the use of ''night lights'' as proxies for GDP, Hender-
son, Storeygard and Weil, 2009), but our focus here is the measurement of
physical - spatial characteristics of urban development.
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