Quantitative Measurement Of Urban Sprawl

With the rapid economic development, and acceleration of urbanization, many cities in China began to appear urban sprawl. This is mainly due to the rapid expansion and the uncontrolled development of urban land use , So a major problem in urbanization our country is how to improve its quality.Whether urban sprawl has occurred is an important indicator of the quality of the urbanization. Therefore, to determine whether there has been urban sprawl and what is the extent of urban sprawl is crucial. The quantitative measures of urban sprawl can reflect whether the city planning is reasonable by its measure factors. In a city with no urban sprawl, it shows compact city land-use, high population density, reasonable transport planning, many walking access, good accessibility, and its continued development will not harm the city's peri-urban farmland.Good urban development is not only saving the social costs, but also protecting the environment and bringing great convenience to people's social activities.The objectives of this research are:(1) To indentify and integrate a set of quantitative measures which can suit the context of China's urbanization. There are a total of 23 indicators of quantitative measures.(2) To develop Sprawl, a tool for quantitative measurement of urban sprawl. Sprawl is coded by VBA program under the platform of ArcGIS9.2. On the condition that GIS data is available, Sprawl can measure each quantitative indicator of urban sprawl.(3) To conduct a case study of a hypothesized city using Sprawl, by measuring the sprawl's indicators in different years. This paper also proposed a "Relative Sprawl of Composite Index", which consolidated all the indicators together.This is an exploration to identify the extent of the urban sprawl.