Urban Sprawl Research Paper

Measuring sprawl and its quality-of-life impacts
Introduction
In 1958 William Whyte in his book “The Exploding Metropolis” referred to a new notion in planning, “Suburban Sprawl”, and alerted Americans that their cities were becoming more sprawling. This began the debate over sprawl and its impacts. The debate continues decade after decade but there is still little agreement on the definition of sprawl or its alternatives: compact development, pedestrian-friendly design, transit-oriented development, and the catch-all term “smart growth.” (Richardson & Gordon, 2001) There is also little consensus about how sprawl impacts everything from housing affordability and traffic congestion to open space preservation and air quality (Burchell,1998 …show more content…
While many metrics have been developed since then, there were few that attempted to measure sprawl multi-dimensionally and none have been updated to 2010.
Early attempts to measure the extent of urban sprawl were mostly crude. Several researchers created measures of urban sprawl that focused on density (Pendall 1999; Fulton et al. 2001; Lopez and Hynes 2003; Anthony, 2004; Lang, 2003; Pendall and Carruthers, 2003). The most notable feature of early studies (with exceptions noted below) was the failure to define sprawl in all its complexity. Density is relatively easy to measure, and hence serves as the sole indicator of sprawl in several studies. This flies in the face of both the technical literature and popular conceptions of sprawl.
On an entirely different track, other researchers have borrowed concepts from landscape ecology to analyze land fragmentation and develop spatial measures of urban form (Besussi and Chin, 2003, Burchfield et al., 2006,Irwin and Bockstael, 2007, Malpezzi and Guo, 2001 and Torrens and Alberti, 2000). These studies use land cover maps derived from satellite imagery to compute form parameters such as fragmentation, edge density, and fractal dimension (Huang, 2007; Martellozzo & Clarke, 2011; Poelmans & Van Rompaey, 2009). Increasing availability and quality of satellite imagery have made it easier in recent years to study …show more content…
Much of the research has a focus on race (Hardaway and McLoyd, 2008), family background (Jäntii, et. al., 2006; Black and Devereux, 2010), income (Corak, 2006), family structure, particularly divorce (DeLeire and Lopoo, 2010) as determinants of social mobility. Poorly staffed and funded schools in poor and working-class neighborhoods, inadequate prenatal nutrition and health care, environmental hazards and pollutions are some of the factors that affect the success of a poor youth seeking to a better life (Delgado, 2007). Also, in a recent study researchers from Harvard University found that one of the key determinants of social mobility is geography; where a person is born may often dictate how likely that person is to move out of the social class in which he or she was raised (Chetty, et. al.,

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