**Just What is Sprawl, Anyway?**

George Hess (Forestry Department, NC State University, Raleigh, NC
27695-8002, grhess@ncsu.edu)

Salinda S. Daley, Becky K. Dennison, Sharon R. Lubkin, Robert P.
McGuinn, Vanessa Z. Morin,

Kevin M. Potter, Rick E. Savage, Wade G. Shelton, Chris M. Snow, and
Beth M. Wrege

Suburban sprawl is a hot topic across the country, as residential
developments and strip malls rapidly replace former farm fields and
forest. Often blamed for a variety of social and environmental ills --
including traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, wildlife habitat
destruction, and water and air pollution -- sprawl is on the minds of
community leaders and national politicians alike.

But how can you tell whether a city is sprawling? And how to do you
measure the extent of sprawl once you've defined what sprawl is?

A team of North Carolina State University and Duke University graduate
students and faculty members asked those questions during a
semester-long research class (Spring 2001). The results of the group's
work are scheduled to be published in the summer 2001 edition of the
journal *Carolina Planning: The City and Regional Planning Journal of
the Southeast*.

The team's conclusion: Sprawl is relative. In other words, it's
difficult to nail down the point at which a city becomes sprawled, but
relatively easy to say that one city is more or less sprawled than
another; or that a city is becoming more sprawling over time.

Team invited a panel of development, urban planning and environmental
experts to discuss the landscape patterns that characterize sprawl. It
also conducted an extensive search to find how sprawl is defined in
scientific and popular literature.

The team next located data that could be analyzed to measure some of
these characteristics. To ensure that these measures could be used
anywhere in the United States, the team limited itself to information,
such as U.S. Census data, that are readily available in a standardized
format for cities across the nation.

Using statistical methods to analyze these data for 49 Census-defined
urban areas in the mid-Atlantic region, the group divided those cities
into four relative categories of sprawl. Those categories are (keyed to
poster):

4\) Relatively low-sprawl cities, that have low overall land
consumption, fringe population densities similar to center-city density,
and relatively low levels of daily driving per person.

3\) Somewhat more sprawled cities, with relatively low overall land
consumption, fringe densities that are much lower than center-city
densities, and a relatively low number of miles driven daily per person.

2\) More sprawled cities, with relatively high overall land consumption,
similar densities in the fringe and city-center (both relatively low),
and a relatively low number of miles driven daily per person.

1\) Considerably more sprawled cities, with relatively high overall land
consumption, similar densities in the fringe and city-center (both
relatively low), and relatively high levels of daily driving per capita.

The paper, a transcript of the panel discussion and a lengthy annotated
list of sprawl-related publications are on the Web at
*http://courses.ncsu.edu/for610v/common*. The research was supported in
part by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.