Sprawling means the expansion of settlements away from central urban areas into low-density, monofunctional and usually car-dependent communities. Throughout the past century, the difference between these sprawling and compact development strategies have been affecting the lives of millions of Americans.
Since 2002, Smart Growth America having been measuring and analyzing sprawling patterns in the US and its impact. Their Measuring Sprawl 2014 report shows the sprawling situations in 221 metropolitan areas and 994 counties in the United States as of 2010, looking to see which communities are more compact and connected and which are more sprawling.
Researchers used four primary factors -
1. residential and employment density;
2. neighborhood mix of homes, jobs and services
3. strength of activity centers and downtowns; and
4. accessibility of the street network
to evaluate development in these areas and assign a Sprawl Index score to each. This report includes a list of the most compact and most sprawling metro areas in the country.
Learn more from this CityLab article