Measuring Urban Sprawl; How Can We Deal With It? Amnon Frenkel, Maya Ashkenazi Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, and Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Tel: +972-4-8293956, Fax: +972-4-8294071, E-mail:
[email protected],ac,il Abstract Measuring urban sprawl is a controversial topic among scholars who investigate the urban landscape. This study attempts to measure sprawl from a landscape perspective. The measures and indices used derive from various research disciplines, such as urban research, ecological research, and fractal geometry. The examination was based on an urban land-use survey performed in 78 urban settlements in Israel over the course of 15 years. Measures of sprawl were calculated at each settlement and then weighted into one integrated sprawl index through factor analysis, thus enabling a description of sprawl rates and their dynamics during a time period of two decades. The results reveal that urban sprawl is a multidimensional phenomenon that is better quantified by various measures. Keywords: Urban Sprawl, Sprawl Indices, Land Use, Growth Management Policy 1 1. Introduction During the past two decades urban sprawl has become a subject of particular interest among planners and policy-makers. Critics of sprawl all over the world are concerned by its many alleged negative impacts, such as lack of scale economies, which reduces the level of public services in the suburbs and weakens the economic base of central cities; increased energy consumption through encouraging the use of private vehicles, thereby causing traffic congestion and air pollution; and irreversible damage to ecosystems, caused by scattered and fragmented urban development in open lands (Ewing 1997; Burchell et al., 1998; Downs, 1998; Brueckner, 2000; Johnson, 2001).