Environmental Impacts of Urban Sprawl: A Survey of the Literature and Proposed Research Agenda

‘Urban sprawl’ has recently become a subject of popular debate and policy initiatives from governmental bodies and nonprofit organizations. However, there is little agreement on many aspects of this phenomenon: its definition, its impacts—both nonmonetary and monetary—economic and policy models that predict the presence of sprawl, and decision-support models that could assist policymakers in evaluating alternative development schemes that may have characteristics of sprawl. In particular, there is relatively little research on urban sprawl that focuses specifically on measurement and modeling of environmental impacts. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to survey the literature on urban sprawl, with a focus on environmental aspects and to identify a research agenda that might result in a greater number of anaytical tools for academics and practitioners to characterize, monetize, model, and make planning decisions about sprawl.