causes of sprawl_qje_2006.pdf
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Title: CAUSES OF SPRAWL: A PORTRAIT FROM SPACE
Author: MARCY BURCHFIELD, HENRY G. OVERMAN, DIEGO PUGA, and MATTHEW A. TURNER
Series: 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2006
Abstract: We study the extent to which U. S. urban development is sprawling and what
determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track
the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30
30 meter cells, we measure
sprawl as the amount of undeveloped land surrounding an average urban dwelling.
The extent of sprawl remained roughly unchanged between 1976 and 1992,
although it varied dramatically across metropolitan areas. Ground water availability,
temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralized employment, early public
transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth, and unincorporated
land in the urban fringe all increase sprawl.

For helpful comments and suggestions we thank three anonymous referees,
William Fischel, Masahisa Fujita, John Hartwick, Vernon Henderson, John Landis,
William Strange, and, in particular, Edward Glaeser. We also received helpful
comments from seminar participants at the University of California Berkeley,
Harvard University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Stanford University, and at
conferences organized by the Regional Science Association International, the
Centre for Economic Policy Research, the Association of Environmental and
Resource Economists, and the Lincoln Institute. We are very grateful to Ferko
Csillag for his advice on remote-sensing data. Also to the U. S. Geological Survey,
and in particular to Stephen Howard and James Vogelmann, for early access to
preliminary versions of the 1992 data. Vernon Henderson and Jordan Rappaport
kindly provided us with data on metropolitan population 1920–1990, Matthew
Kahn with data on employment decentralization, and Jacob Vigdor with data on
streetcar usage. Kent Todd helped with ARC Macro Language scripts. While
working on this project, Burchfield was an Master’s student at the Department of
Geography, University of Toronto. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (Puga and Turner) and from the Centre de
Recerca en Economia Internacional and the Centre de Refere`ncia d’Economia
Analı´tica (Puga), as well as the support of the Canadian Institute for Advanced
Research (Puga) and the National Fellows program at the Hoover Institution
(Turner) are gratefully acknowledged.