The Measurement of Suburban Sprawl: An Evaluation

We review and analyze how suburban sprawl has been conceptualized and measured in recent urban research. We find that indexes created to measure sprawl in metropolitan areas do so in three different ways. Some measures are based on residential population density, others specifically measure the extent of job or employment sprawl, and others consider sprawl a multidimensional land use phenomenon (and provide separate indexes for each dimension). Our analyses show that (1) most residential population density indexes reflect other dimensions of sprawl; (2) it is useful to think of metropolitan areas as positioned on two distinct dimensions of sprawl (i.e., centeredness and density–mixed land use); and (3) job sprawl and residential sprawl vary independently from each other. We provide recommendations regarding which sprawl measures are most appropriate for research applications.