University of Toronto scientists are using satellite data and aerial photography to track the evolution of land use in the continental United States.
The researchers, so far, have created a grid of 8.7 million data cells. From that data they have determined recent urban development in Los Angeles is less scattered than recent development in Boston and that Miami is America’s most compact big city and Pittsburgh its most sprawling.
The researchers — UT’s Matthew Turner; Marcy Burchfield of the Toronto-based Neptis Foundation; Diego Puga, a visiting professor from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain; and Henry Overman of the London School of Economics — say they determined changing the number or size of municipal governments in a metropolitan area has no impact on whether urban development is scattered, but controlling access to groundwater is effective.
The research is detailed in the May issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
