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The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl:

Which Land Should Be Considered?*

Article  in  The Professional Geographer · February 2005

DOI: 10.1111/j.0033-0124.2005.00462.x

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The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl:
Which Land Should Be Considered?*

Harold Wolman
George Washington University
George Galster
Wayne State University
Royce Hanson
George Washington University
Michael Ratcliffe
U.S. Census Bureau
Kimberly Furdell
George Washington University
Andrea Sarzynski
George Washington University

Lack of agreement on how to define and measure sprawl has hampered development of policy related to its causes
and consequences. We question previous work for two reasons: the use of study areas that overbound or
underbound sprawl landscapes, and the failure to account for land unavailable for development. We formulate
‘‘extended urban areas,’’ based on housing density and commuting patterns and argue that they represent a
preferable geographic basis for measuring sprawl. We operationalize with satellite imagery a way for measuring
land unavailable for development in these areas. We then compute five measures of urban development using the
National Land Cover Data Base and decennial census data to assess the extent of sprawl in the extended urban
areas of Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington. Our sensitivity analyses reveal that the
measurement of sprawl critically depends on which land area forms the basis of the analysis, and, to a lesser
degree, how one accounts for land unavailable for development. Key Words: sprawl, urban policy, urbanized
areas.

Introduction: Pinning Down an
Elusive Concept
otwithstanding the volumes of print re-
N cently expended on the subject (e.g.,
Squires 2002; Wievel and Persky 2002), there
remains a paucity of rigorous, replicable exam-
inations of the statistical relationships between
metropolitan sprawl and a variety of hypothe-
sized (or asserted) effects such as congestion,
pollution, inequality, housing costs, and segre-
gation ( Johnson 2001; though, see Kahn 2001;
Lopez and Hynes 2003; and Pendall and
Carruthers 2003). The lack of such research in
a form that permits quantitative comparison of
a large number of metropolitan regions within a
common analytical framework hampers thought-
ful public debate and policymaking (Galster et al.
2001). The common nexus of difficulty consists
of pinning down what is meant by sprawl, how it
should be measured, and what geographical
area and type of land should be considered.

* This research was funded in part by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) under Cooperative Agreement No. 01CRAG0009, whose support is
gratefully acknowledged. The opinions expressed in this report are the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USGS or the
organizations for whom they work.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Doug Towns and Jackie Cutsinger of Wayne State’s Center for Urban Studies for their GIS and
programming assistance. Anonymous referees provided helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.

The Professional Geographer, 57(1) 2005, pages 94–105 r Copyright 2005 by Association of American Geographers.
Initial submission, May 2003; final acceptance, February 2004.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.
The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl: Which Land Should Be Considered?
Galster et al. (2001) observed that ‘‘sprawl’’
was a term without an agreed-upon content that
existed in the equivalent of a semantic wilder-
ness. After reviewing the literature, they noted
that sprawl has frequently been used to charac-
terize one or more of the following: (1) the pat-
terns of residential and nonresidential land use,
(2) the process of extending the reach of urban-
ized areas, (3) the causes of particular practices of
land use, and (4) the consequences of those prac-
tices. They further observed that sprawl can be
defined as either a condition or a process. When
used to describe or signify a condition charac-
terizing an urban area, or part of it at a particular
time, ‘‘sprawl’’ is a noun. When used to describe
a process of converting land from nonurban to
urban uses over time (Fulton et al. 2001) or
changes in the extent or intensity of urbaniza-
tion, particularly at the urban fringe, it becomes
a verb.
When the definition of sprawl is so ambigu-
ous and idiosyncratic, it is impossible to know
with any confidence its causes or consequences
or the effects of any policies designed to contain
it. Clearly, a critical first step must be to work
toward consensus about what sprawl is and then
measure it in comparable fashion across a large
number of comparably defined urban regions
(ideally, over time, as well). Such careful work is
a necessary precondition for examining the crit-
ical public policy questions related to the effects
of sprawl on concerns such as congestion, pol-
lution, housing prices, income and racial in-
equality, and other urban issues.
Fortunately, there have been a number of re-
cent seminal efforts to define and empirically
operationalize sprawl.1 Several works have fo-
cused on sprawl as a ‘‘low-density’’ phenome-
non (Fulton et al. 2001; Nasser and Overberg
2001; Lopez and Hynes 2003) and have meas-
ured their concept for a substantial group of
urban regions in the United States. Nasser and
Overberg (2001) quantify sprawl as the per-
centage of a metropolitan area’s population
that resides within the Census Bureau-defined
urbanized area (contiguous blocks general-
ly having one thousand or more persons per
square mile). Analogously, Lopez and Hynes
(2003) operationally define sprawl as the differ-
ence between the percentage of a metropolitan
area’s population living in ‘‘low density tracts’’
(200 to 3,500 persons per square mile) and the
percentage living in ‘‘high density tracts’’ (more
95
than 3,500 persons per square mile). Fulton
et al. (2001) define sprawl as ‘‘land resources
consumed to accommodate new urbanization,’’
and measure it as the ratio of growth in land
consumption to growth in population of
the metropolitan area.2 Lang (2003) extends the
work done by Nasser and Overberg (2001) and
offers two sets of density measures for the fifty
largest metropolitan areas, using, first, the Cen-
sus Bureau-defined urbanized area and then the
Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources
Inventory (NRI) urban land uses. While the
authors acknowledge that sprawl cannot be ad-
equately measured by density alone, each of
these studies is nonetheless limited by its sole
focus on density measures to the exclusion of
other dimensions of sprawl.3
A different set of studies has conceptualized
sprawl as a multidimensional concept, with each
dimension requiring a distinct measure. Torrens
and Alberti (2000) offer several sophisticated,
spatial-statistical measures for aspects of sprawl
such as density, scatter, leapfrogging, intersper-
sion, and accessibility.4 The sprawl measures
developed by Malpezzi and Guo (2001) include:
average population density, density of the me-
dian and the 10th percentile tract, the Gini co-
efficient of tract densities, various forms of
population density gradients, the regression
fit of population density gradients (which they
term a measure of discontinuity), and the ( pop-
ulation-weighted) average and median distances
between tracts and the CBD (which they term a
measure of compactness). Ewing, Pendall, and
Chen (2002) developed a composite ‘‘sprawl in-
dex’’ for eighty-three metropolitan areas, based
on four dimensions: residential density; neigh-
borhood mix of homes, jobs, and services;
strength of activity centers and downtowns;
and accessibility of the street network. Galster
et al. (2001) defined sprawl as a pattern of land
use in an urban area that exhibits low levels of
some combination of eight distinct dimensions
of land use: density, continuity, concentration,
clustering, centrality, nuclearity, mixed use, and
proximity. Galster et al. (2001) then developed
operational measures for each of these dimen-
sions and calculated them for a small, prototype
set of urban areas.
Each of these pathbreaking efforts to measure
sprawl has its strengths and limitations of con-
cept, data, and methods. A detailed analysis of
these elements is left to another time. The pur-
96 Volume 57, Number 1, February 2005
pose of this article is to address two questions
common to all of them and crucial to the effec-
tive measurement of sprawl:
1. What is the appropriate geographic scale
over which to measure sprawl?
2. How should land that is not available for
development (lakes, parks, designated open
space, and/or environmentally protected ar-
eas) be treated?
These questions are important because they af-
fect the precision of measurement of sprawl and,
thus, our understanding of the extent and char-
acter of several of its dimensions. This, in turn,
influences the policy responses that may be ap-
propriate in reducing or avoiding its causes,
ameliorating or preventing its consequences, or
exploiting any of its advantages.
This article, therefore, focuses on the issues
surrounding these two questions. In doing so,
we contribute to the evolving sprawl literature
by: (1) providing a new, theoretically grounded
specification for the study area over which
sprawl is measured; (2) devising a way to meas-
ure land that is not available for development;
and (3) assessing how sensitive sprawl measures
are to variations in the study area and the treat-
ment of unavailable land.
The Challenge of Specifying
Appropriate Geographic Scale
The Over- and Underbounding
Biases Problem
In past empirical work, it has been conventional
to use metropolitan areas (MAs) as the relevant
unit of spatial analysis (Fulton et al. 2001; Kahn
2001; Malpezzi and Guo 2001; Nasser and
Overberg 2001; Ewing, Pendall, and Chen
2002; Lopez and Hynes 2003; Pendall and
Carruthers 2003). Though handy from the
standpoint of ease of data collection, MAs like-
ly ‘‘overbound’’ the area over which sprawl
should be measured. MAs are based on one or
more counties and, as such, often contain large,
outlying rural areas that are not functionally
connected to the central core and in which little
or no development is occurring.5 The addition
of such peripheral areas might well bias upward
the estimates of sprawl.
By contrast, Galster et al. (2001) made use
of the Census Bureau-defined urbanized area,
rather than the MA.6 Using the urbanized area
is not an ideal solution, however, and likely
‘‘underbounds’’ the appropriate area in which to
measure sprawl. Territories included in urban-
ized areas are contiguous and generally have a
density of at least 1,000 persons per square mile,
thereby excluding development at and beyond
the urbanized area fringe that many consider the
essence of sprawl. Thus, the resultant measures
of sprawl will be biased downward.
Most studies have essentially sidestepped the
problem of what to do about the development
between the urbanized fringe and the MA
boundary that is often regarded as the essence
of sprawl (but see Fulton et al. 2001; Lopez and
Hynes 2003). One might attempt to deal with
this issue by arbitrarily extending the boundary
beyond the urbanized area for some distance to
try to capture all or part of the fringe sprawl.
However, this approach can leave out places
beyond the arbitrary demarcation line that have
sufficient density and economic ties to the core
urban area to be included, while, at the same
time, including rural areas with none of the
characteristics associated with sprawl. Such an
approach strikes us as arbitrary, atheoretical,
and difficult to replicate using consistent deci-
sion rules across different areas.
A Proposal: The Extended Urban Area
We believe that an appropriate sprawl study area
should include the densely populated urbanized
core, adjacent urbanized or urbanizing territory
developed at densities below the urbanized
area threshold of 1,000 persons per square mile,
and additional developed territory linked to
the urbanized area through commuting ties.
Accordingly, we propose the following speci-
fication of the appropriate area for sprawl meas-
urement:
The Extended Urban Area (EUA)7 consists of
the Census Bureau-defined urbanized area,
modified to follow census tract boundaries, as
well as additional ‘‘outlying’’ one mile square
grid cells that contain 60 or more dwelling units
(identified using data at the census block level),
and are located in census tract from which at
least 30 percent of the workers commute to the
urbanized area.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture/Eco-
nomic Research Service’s (USDA/ERS) Rural-
Urban Commuting Areas (RUCAs) provided an
efficient means of identifying each EUA. Using
The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl: Which Land Should Be Considered?
1990 census data, the USDA/ERS assigned each
1990 census tract a rural-urban commuting
code based on its level of urbanization or its
commuting ties with urban centers (Morrill,
Cromartie, and Hart 1999). The RUCA classi-
fication consists of ten levels, ranging from
‘‘metropolitan area core’’ (rural-urban commut-
ing code 1) to ‘‘rural areas’’ (rural-urban com-
muting code 10). Commutation between each
census tract and various-sized urban cores is
calculated, with each tract classified based on
the size and destination of its primary and sec-
ondary commuting flows. Tracts within RUCA
codes 1 (within the metropolitan core), 2, 4, 7,
and 10 (all outside of modified urbanized area
boundaries) were initially selected as potential
candidates for inclusion within the EUA. The
tracts were then included if 30 percent or more
of their residents commuted to jobs that were
located within the modified urbanized area. The
RUCA system provided a rich amount of detail
describing each tract in terms of both structural
and functional characteristics, with the added
advantage of being freely available on the Web
site: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/rural/data/
desc.htm.
This RUCA selection process yielded a set of
census tracts that were either part of the urban-
ized core of a metropolitan area or had relatively
strong ties with the core, as measured by com-
muting. Application of the minimum dwelling
unit threshold of sixty units per one mile grid
further identified those census blocks that we
believe exhibited levels of development typically
associated with urbanization or extension of
suburban sprawl.
Our definition of an EUA yields a theoreti-
cally justifiable and reasonably sized study area.
It avoids both the over- and underbounding
of the sprawl study area. Our EUA definition
makes it possible to account for any substantial
development beyond the urbanized area that
has a gross density of approximately one resi-
dential unit per ten acres, but it excludes areas
devoted primarily to agriculture or forestry and
small villages that, though meeting density re-
quirements, do not have strong economic ties to
the urbanized area.
We provide a visual portrayal of the result of
our EUA specification for the Atlanta area in
Figure 1. The counties located within the At-
lanta MA in 1990 are shown. The urbanized
area boundary is identified by the white bound-
97
ary line around the core of the MA. Census
blocks within the MA with sixty housing units in
1990 are shaded in dark gray. Finally, RUCAs in
the MA with the requisite 30 percent or higher
commutation rates are shown as medium gray
tones. Our EUA consists of the urbanized area
plus all dark gray territory (qualifying density)
within the medium gray territories (qualifying
commutation RUCAs). Treating the entire MA
(all territory shown in Figure 1) as the study area
would result in the inclusion of considerable
amounts of rural territory that have little devel-
opment or economic relationship to Atlanta. By
contrast, use of the urbanized area as the study
area in which to measure Atlanta’s sprawl would
overlook substantial urbanization in the com-
muter shed just beyond the urbanized area
boundary.
A Sensitivity Analysis
What are the consequences for the measure-
ment of sprawl of switching from the urbanized
area to the EUA as the relevant unit of geo-
graphic analysis? We tested the sensitivity of
results for the Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Los
Angeles, and Washington, DC, areas as well as
for a consolidated Baltimore-Washington area.
We first note that the EUA was, on average, 61
percent larger than the urbanized area, varying
from 26 percent larger in Boston to 75 percent
larger in Los Angeles.
We next examined the impact of adding
this land for various dimensions of sprawl.
Throughout we employ five measures of sprawl
developed by Galster et al. (2001).8 The respec-
tive dimensions are defined as follows:

Density is the average number of residen-
tial units per square mile of developable
land in an area. Lower densities are more
sprawl-like.

Concentration is the degree to which hous-
ing units are located disproportionately in
a relatively few square miles of an area.
Less concentrated areas are deemed more
sprawl-like.

Centrality is the degree to which residen-
tial development is located close to the
central business district of an area. Low
centrality is more sprawl-like.

Nuclearity is the extent to which the built
environment of an area is characterized by
a single, highly dense node (as contrasted
98 Volume 57, Number 1, February 2005

Atlanta, Georgia
Georgia
Metropolitan Area
Picken
s
Pickens
Picken

Barto
w
Bartow Cherokee Forsyth

Barro
w
Barrow
Barro
Cobb Gwinnett
Paulding

DeKalb Walton
Walton Figure 1 Atlanta, GA, Metropoli-
Dougla
Douglas
s Fulton
Fulton tan Area and territory considered
Rockdal
Rockdale
e
g

for inclusion in the extended urban

Carroll Clayton
y

Newton area.

Fayette
Fayette Henry
Newton
e

Coweta

Spalding

WSU/USGS Urban Sprawl Project, 11/8/01djt

- County
- RUCA* Tract extent
- Census Blocks containing at least
60 Housing Units
- Urbanized Area

with a multiple-nodal) pattern of devel-
opment. The more polynuclear (or less
mononuclear) an area is, the more sprawl-
like it is.

Proximity is the degree to which cross-
area observations of a particular land use
or pair of land uses are close to each other,
relative to the distribution of all land
comprising the study area. Proximity is
maximized when all locations with the
highest densities of the given land uses are
closest together. Low levels of proximity
are more sprawl-like.
Formal equations for operationalizing these
measures are presented in Galster et al. (2001).
We used 1990 census housing unit data to com-
pute the aforementioned dimensions for the six
geographic areas investigated (see Table 1).
Density Switching the area of analysis from
the urbanized area to the EUA resulted in a
dramatic drop in housing unit density values.
The average decline for our six test areas was
40.7 percent. However, the correlation between
the density scores for the two alternative study
areas remained very high (r ¼ 0.95), and there
was very little change in the relative rankings
(Baltimore moved from the fourth to fifth
most dense, changing places with Boston).
The Spearman Rho rank order correlation be-
tween the urbanized area and EUA rankings
was 0.94.
Concentration The concentration index in
the EUA increased in each case compared to the
urbanized area (by an average of 35.5 percent),
indicating, as expected, that more units would
have to be redistributed in the larger area in
order to achieve an equal distribution of hous-
ing units. However, like density, there was rel-
atively little change in rankings, and the rank
order correlation was 0.71.
The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl: Which Land Should Be Considered?
Table 1 Percent Change from Urbanized Area to Extended Urban Area Using Census Housing Data, by
Area
Index Atlanta Baltimore Boston Los Angeles
Density 43.85 45.31 30.55 35.26
Concentration 51.09 28.88 12.64 25.41
Centrality 6.21 12.60 5.66 28.37
Nuclearity 20.63 1.58 12.47 15.71
Proximity 12.47 11.15 4.58 8.73
*Pearson’s r correlating values of sprawl dimensions using Census Housing Data for Urbanized Area and Extended Urban Area
Centrality Centrality declined by switching
to the EUA since development far from the core
was added to the study area, and index stand-
ardization by a larger EUA was insufficient to
offset this. The average decline was 14.6 per-
cent, though the decline was particularly large
for Los Angeles (28.4 percent) and Washington
(18.5 percent). There were also more substan-
tial shifts in the rankings: Los Angeles shifted
from the most centralized of the six areas among
the urbanized areas to fifth among the EUAs,
and Boston shifted from the fifth most cen-
tralized of the urbanized areas to third most
centralized among the EUAs. While the
Pearsonian correlation was 0.62, the rank order
correlation between the urbanized area and
EUA rankings showed no correlation (0.03).
Nuclearity Nuclearity declined for most of
the areas by moving to an EUA, although it in-
creased substantially for Washington, DC, by
almost 50 percent. The increase in nuclearity
for Washington, DC, is explicable because of
the way the operationalization of nuclearity
idiosyncratically affected this area.9
Proximity The proximity measure increased
for each of the areas when switching from
the urbanized area to the EUA. The average in-
crease was 12.6 percent. The rank order corre-
lation was 0.77 (but Washington, DC, moved
from the fourth most sprawl-like urbanized area
to the sixth most sprawl-like EUA). Moreover, the
Pearsonian correlation coefficient was 0.66. The
change to higher (less sprawl-like) values of prox-
imity, despite shifting to a larger and less dense
geographic area when using the EUA, results
from the measurement procedure that standard-
izes for size of geographic area investigated.10
As a rough summary measure of sprawl, we
calculated Z-scores for each of the study areas
for each dimension and summed the Z-scores
99
Washington Baltimore- Average Pearson’s r*
Washington
44.22 45.00 40.70 0.954
43.68 51.46 35.53 0.683
18.45 16.36 14.61 0.620
49.97 28.79 5.26 0.732
24.66 13.69 12.55 0.662
for each area across the five dimensions. (A Z-
score is the number of standard deviations each
observation is from the mean; it thus standard-
izes units of measurement across the dimen-
sions.) We then compared the summed Z-scores
for the urbanized areas to those for the EUAs
to assess whether switching to the larger area of
analysis had a substantial effect on the relative
rankings of overall sprawl on five dimensions
(see Table 2a, b). Atlanta proved by far the most
sprawled area overall for both urbanized areas
and EUAs specified in our sample, while Balti-
more was the least sprawled for both area
measures. However, the ranks of the other four
areas appear more sensitive to designation of
study area, with the EUA making Boston and
Los Angeles appear relatively more sprawled,
and Washington and combined Baltimore-
Washington less sprawled (see Table 2a, b).
Thus, switching from urbanized area to the
EUA does make a difference for several dimen-
sions of sprawl in several of our study sites. We
think the switch is one that is both substantively
important and corresponds more closely with
sprawl as a construct.
The Challenge of Specifying Land that
Is Unavailable for Development
The Biases from Including Land that
is Unavailable for Development
The second difficult issue in specifying the ap-
propriate land for the measurement of sprawl
involves the treatment of acreage that cannot be
developed for various reasons. Bodies of water,
floodplains and wetlands, national, state, and
local parklands, unstable soils and steep slopes,
for example, may interrupt the development
pattern of an area. As a result, sprawl may ar-
tificially appear to be intensified on various
100 Volume 57, Number 1, February 2005

Table 2a Z-Scores for the Five Study Areas on Each Dimension Using Census Housing Data, by Urban
Area
City Density Concentration Centrality Nuclearity Proximity Total Z-score Rank by Z-score

Atlanta 1.336 1.737 1.941 1.429 0.550 6.994 6

Baltimore 0.350 0.772 0.332 1.440 1.297 3.491 1
Boston 0.759 1.474 0.569 1.070 1.262 2.478 2
Los Angeles 1.801 0.088 1.102 0.659 0.390 1.766 3
Washington 0.505 0.474 0.584 0.540 0.116 0.040 4
Balt-Wash 0.139 0.035 0.492 0.119 1.502 0.716 5

Table 2b Z-Scores for the Five Study Areas on Each Dimension Using Census Housing Data, by Extended
Urban Area
City Density Concentration Centrality Nuclearity Proximity Total Z-score Rank by Z-score

Atlanta 1.281 1.700 1.961 1.643 0.524 7.109 6

Baltimore 0.550 0.760 0.987 0.999 1.082 3.278 1
Boston 0.212 0.300 0.539 0.180 0.129 0.935 4
Los Angeles 1.988 0.760 0.587 1.055 0.838 1.252 5
Washington 0.199 0.040 0.404 0.707 1.460 2.730 2
Balt-Wash 0.143 1.380 0.617 0.811 1.305 1.360 3

dimensions. Apparent discontinuities in land
use (‘‘leap-frog’’ growth) will be generated and
average densities will be reduced if such acreage
were to be included among the geographic units
of analysis over which sprawl indices were
calculated.
We think it highly desirable on conceptual
grounds to measure several dimensions of
sprawl based on the net land area that is actu-
ally available for development in an EUA. For
example, residential density measurements
should employ, in principle, developable land
as the base. Similarly, a distinction should be
made between a break in continuity because of
the presence of a physical or policy barrier, such
as a body of water or a state park, and discon-
tinuous development resulting from skipping
over land that is suitable for development but,
for some reason, has been withheld.
Empirically Estimating Land that
is Unavailable for Development
Despite the obvious conceptual attractions in
doing so, it is difficult to identify land that is
unavailable for development. The Census Bu-
reau data used in most previous work do not
distinguish vacant land that has simply been
passed over but remains in the inventory of po-
tentially developable land from land that cannot
be developed for natural or policy reasons.11 To
our knowledge, there are no GIS databases
identifying parks or national forests that are
readily available for the nation as a whole. Top-
ographical data are available to identify areas of
steep slopes, but not without considerable re-
source commitments.
In order to operationalize land that is una-
vailable for development, we turned to the
United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) Na-
tional Land Cover Data Base (NLCDB). The
NLCDB is a satellite photography-based data
set that provides representations of land cover
on small areas of land ( pixels) of approximate-
ly thirty meters square. Each pixel can be
identified according to its general use.12 Conse-
quently, we are able to distinguish in a con-
sistent, defensible fashion: developed land,
undeveloped land that is potentially developa-
ble, and undeveloped land that is unavailable for
development.
Developed land identifiable by the NLCDB
includes land used for purposes of low-intensity
residential; high-intensity residential; commer-
cial, industrial, and transportation; and urban
and recreational grasses. The NLCDB also al-
lows us to operationalize a reasonable measure
of acreage that is not available for development
due to natural conditions: open water; perennial
ice and snow; woody wetlands; and emergent
herbaceous wetlands. Similarly, it can be used to
identify developable land—land that is poten-
tially available for development but has not yet
The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl: Which Land Should Be Considered?
been developed. Such land includes forest
and shrubland; orchards; grasslands; pastures and
hay; land used for crops or grain; fallow land;
bare rock, sand, and clay; and quarries, strip
mines, and gravel pits.
We must note that NLCDB cannot provide
unambiguous information for operationalizing
the notion of undevelopable land. First, it can-
not distinguish between developable land and
similarly appearing but unavailable land that is
set aside for parks or wilderness areas as both
register the same aerial photographic images.
Second, it does not specify the slope of the to-
pography, and thus steep terrain upon which it
may be infeasible to build may erroneously ap-
pear developable. Third, we have assumed that
certain categories of land that might not seem
hospitable for development may nonetheless be
developed if there is sufficient demand. There-
fore, for example, we classify bare rock, clay, and
sand parcels as well as quarries, strip mines,
and gravel pits as ‘‘developable.’’ It therefore
appears that our operationalization tends to
understate the amount of land not available for
development. To the extent that this degree of
understatement varies across study areas, it will
introduce some bias into the sprawl estimates.
A Sensitivity Analysis
Would excluding land that is unavailable for
development make a meaningful difference in
measuring some dimensions of sprawl? In prac-
tical terms, being able to measure (even approx-
imately) the amount of land unavailable for
development only matters if it amounts to more
than a trivial proportion of land in large urban
areas and if there is variation among areas in that
proportion. As Table 3 indicates, both of these
conditions are true. The average percentage of
land unavailable for development in the EUAs is
Table 3 Undevelopable, Developable, and Total Land Use for Extended Urban Areas (EUA)
City Un- Developable, Developed
developable Undeveloped
Atlanta EUA 167,368 4,743,964
Baltimore EUA 378,172 2,711,914
Balt-Wash EUA 744,302 6,426,058
Boston EUA 1,375,289 2,911,590
Los Angeles EUA 817,921 6,645,492
Washington EUA 289,090 3,703,433
Average EUA
101
nearly 10 percent, and the percentage varies
from 2.7 percent in Atlanta to 21.8 percent in
Boston.13 Moreover, given the aforementioned
resolution limits in our data, these are likely
underestimates.
In order to determine the effect that remov-
ing land unavailable for development has on the
relative sprawl rankings of our test sites, we cal-
culated values for density, using, first, total land
and then, developable land.14 We found that in
the EUAs we examined, the increase in the den-
sity value averaged 10.1 percent, ranging from
an increase of only 2.6 percent in the Atlanta
EUA to an increase of 27.1 percent in the Bos-
ton EUA (see Table 4). This changed Boston’s
ranking from third most dense to second.
Nevertheless, the Pearsonian correlation be-
tween the two different measures of density was
0.98, while the Spearman Rho rank-order cor-
relation was 0.83. This suggests to us concerns
over the potential problem of underdeveloped
land may be exaggerated. Of course, this must
be accompanied by cautions that we tested only
one dimension of sprawl, for a small sample of
EUAs, and with a suboptimal measure of land
that is unavailable for development.
We revisited our analysis of Z-scores across
the five study areas for EUAs, using the density
measure adjusted to reflect only developable
land (see Table 5). The Pearsonian correlation
between total Z-scores using unadjusted and
adjusted density was 0.998. However, Boston’s
sizable increase in density when going from
total land to developable land changes its over-
all Z-score ranking from fourth to third. The
Spearman Rho rank order correlation was 0.94.
Conclusion
Public policy efforts to cope with sprawl have
been hampered by the lack of an empirical re-
Total Total Land Undevelopable
Developable as Percent of
Total Land (%)
1,792,444 6,536,408 6,703,776 2.50
998,146 3,710,060 4,088,232 9.25
2,644,896 9,070,954 9,815,256 7.58
2,160,397 5,071,987 6,447,276 21.33
5,002,508 11,648,000 12,465,921 6.56
1,641,189 5,344,622 5,633,712 5.13
8.73
102 Volume 57, Number 1, February 2005

Table 4 Comparison of Adjusted and Unadjusted Density Measures (Unadjusted Measure Is Based on
Total Land; Adjusted Is Based on Developable Land Only)
Unadjusted Adjusted Percent Change

Atlanta 466.02 477.96 2.56

Baltimore 631.92 696.33 10.19
Boston 708.52 900.64 27.12
Los Angeles 1207.54 1292.33 7.02
Washington-Baltimore 724.13 783.55 8.21
Washington 801.85 845.22 5.41
Average 10.08

search base on its causes and consequences. In
large measure, this has been due to the lack of
agreement on exactly what sprawl is, how it
should be measured, and what territory and type
of land should be included in the measurements.
Several recent efforts have been undertaken
to address the former two areas of disagreement.
We have focused on the last: the appropriate
geographic area for sprawl analysis and how
land unavailable for development should be ac-
counted for in sprawl indices. Previous work has
uncritically employed either metropolitan areas
or urbanized areas for analysis and has not at-
tempted to adjust sprawl measures for land un-
available for development, thereby producing
flawed measures. Measurements based on an
underbounded area tend to decrease the appar-
ent degree of sprawl, providing support for
those opposing conservation or alternative land
use and transportation policies. Measurements
based on overbounding of an area increase the
apparent degree of sprawl, thereby lending sup-
port for regulations that are more stringent
and higher public investments than a better-
calibrated measurement might justify.
With respect to the appropriate geographic
area for study, we have argued for constructing
an Extended Urban Area (EUA). Our EUA adds
to the urbanized area census tracts connected to
it through substantial commuting links that si-
multaneously evince urbanized or urbanizing
density (above sixty dwelling units per one mile
grid). Use of the EUA produces results that are
both considerably different and, we think, con-
ceptually more valid than previous efforts based
on other geographic units.
With respect to land that is unavailable for
development, we operationalized a measure
based on the USGS’s National Land Cover Da-
ta Base. We found that there was considerable
variation in the percentage of land not available
for development among the several EUAs in-
vestigated, and we tested the effect of eliminat-
ing such land from the sprawl analysis. We
found that density values increased substantially
across our study sites, with Boston experiencing
a particularly large increase that markedly
changed its ranking in the density hierarchy.
Nonetheless, the correlation of the alternative
density measures that included or excluded land
unavailable for development was very high, sug-
gesting that biases associated with the former
may not be intolerable.
As a guide to future research in the field of
sprawl measurement, we thus recommend that a
more theoretically grounded study area be spec-
ified, such as our EUA. If the results from this
pilot study can be generalized, the resulting
estimates and cross-area rankings of sprawl,
particularly centrality and nuclearity, will be

Table 5 Z-Scores for the Five Study Areas on Each Dimension Using Census Housing Data, by Extended
Urban Area
City Adjusted Density Concentration Centrality Nuclearity Proximity Total Z-score Rank by Z-score

Atlanta 1.281 1.700 1.961 1.643 0.524 7.109 6

Baltimore 0.550 0.760 0.987 0.999 1.082 3.278 1
Boston 0.212 0.300 0.539 0.180 0.129 0.935 4
Los Angeles 1.988 0.760 0.587 1.055 0.838 1.252 5
Washington 0.199 0.040 0.404 0.707 1.460 2.730 2
Balt-Wash 0.143 1.380 0.617 0.811 1.305 1.360 3
The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl: Which Land Should Be Considered?
sensitive to the specification of the geographic
study area. We also recommend that, for certain
dimensions of sprawl-like density and continu-
ity, an attempt be made to distill from the index
calculation any land that cannot be developed
(either for topographical or policy reasons). Our
experiments with NLCDB information offer
considerable advances in this realm. Additional
information (on parks and protected lands,
slopes, and unstable soils) needs to be acquired,
however, before one can operationalize a truly
meaningful notion of land unavailable for de-
velopment. Until a superior measure can be
operationalized, we are loath to make any strong
recommendations about the role of such land in
sprawl measurement.
The significance of this research for policy
makers is that efforts to deal effectively with
sprawl, its causes, and its consequences depend
on understanding its nature and extent. That
understanding depends, in turn, on the ability to
measure it in a sound and consistent manner
across places and time. Providing a theoretically
justified and practical way of bounding what is
measured and excluding land that is unavailable
for development are useful steps toward that end.
Indeed, our own research agenda is directed
toward testing the effect of sprawl, measured, as
we have set forth in this article, on important
metropolitan area conditions. We intend to
measure our various dimensions of sprawl for
fifty major metropolitan areas, conduct a factor
analysis of the dimensions to calculate a fac-
tor score for sprawl in each of these areas, and
then utilize this sprawl score as a variable in
multivariate models designed to explain such
important metropolitan conditions as traffic
congestion, housing prices, pollution, and in-
come and racial inequalities. Research of this
sort will, we believe, have major implications for
the policy debates now swirling around the issue
of sprawl. Such research, however, is possible
10
only after sprawl has been carefully conceptu-
alized and operationalized, a task to which this
article has contributed. ’
Notes
1 added at the fringe. While this may seem mislead-
We acknowledge the support of the Fannie Mae
Foundation for a number of these endeavors, in-
cluding Galster et al. (2001), Fulton et al. (2001),
and Nasser and Overberg (2001).
103
2
Specifically, Fulton et al. (2001) used the Depart-
ment of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Inventory
(NRI) to identify the portion of a metropolitan area
in urban and related uses rather than relying strictly
on a density measure.
3
In an exceptional operationalization, Kahn (2001)
measures sprawl as the percentage of a metropolitan
area’s jobs within ten miles and within thirty-five
miles of the central business district.
4
Unfortunately, they provide no empirical proto-
types measured across a set of metropolitan areas.
5
The shortcomings of using county data for research
on suburban development were recently articulated
by Lang (2003).
6
The Census Bureau defines an urbanized area as
consisting of a central place (or places) and the
densely settled surrounding territory that together
have a population of at least 50,000.
7
Each EUA in this study comprised census tracts
assigned the following Rural-Urban Commuting
Area codes:
1 metropolitan core, primary commuting flow
within an urbanized area;
2 metropolitan high commuting, primary flow of
30 percent or more to an urbanized area;
4.1 large town core, secondary commuting flow
of 30 percent to 50 percent to an urbanized area;
7.1 small town core, secondary commuting flow
of 30 percent to 50 percent to an urbanized area;
and
10.1 rural area, secondary commuting flow of 30
percent to 50 percent to an urbanized area.
8
For detailed discussion of operationalization and
measurement, see Galster et al. (2001).
9
The nuclearity measure first identifies the densest 2
percent of the grids in the study area, then computes
the proportion of these that are contiguous at the
core. With the expansion of the study area, more of
the most dense grids are apparently contiguous to
existing highly dense grids in the central core, thus
extending the number of grids and housing units in
the top 2 percent of the densest grids located in the
central core. The Pearsonian correlation was 0.73,
and there was very little change in the rankings
(rho ¼ 0.83). See Galster et al. (2001) for further
description.
The proximity calculation consists of dividing the
average distance between centroids of the grids (G)
comprising the study area by the weighted average
distance among housing units across grids (R). As a
result of adding new territory, the average distance
among grids (G) will increase, but the weighted av-
erage among housing units (R) may not, since there
are likely to be considerably fewer units on the land
ing, the alternative procedure has even greater
problems. Not standardizing for size will, by def-
inition, make larger UAs and EUAs ipso facto more
104 Volume 57, Number 1, February 2005
sprawl-like on the proximity measure, thus reducing
cross-sectional comparability.
11
A few authors (Fulton et al. 2001; Ewing, Pendall,
and Chen 2002; Lang 2003) have focused on land
that is actually in urbanized uses by using the De-
partment of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Inven-
tory (NRI). While use of the NRI begins to get at
the issue of on-the-ground land use, it still does not
distinguish developable land in a metropolitan area
from land that is unavailable for development.
12
For details on the specific mapping and character-
ization procedures used in the NLCDB, see http://
landcover.usgs.gov/mapping-proc.asp. For another
example of how satellite imagery can be used to
track metropolitan development patterns over time,
see Ryznar and Wagner (2001).
13
Most of the area unavailable for development
around Boston is actually water, given the superim-
position of our grids over jagged coastline and many
harbor islands.
14
We think it conceptually meaningless to compute
continuity without excluding land that is unavaila-
ble for development, so we made no ‘‘before and
after’’ comparisons on that dimension.
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HAROLD WOLMAN is the director of the George
Washington Institute of Public Policy and is professor
of political science and public policy at George
Washington University, Washington, DC 20052.
E-mail: hwolman@gwu.edu. His research interests
are urban policy and politics, comparative public
policy, and land use and economic development
policy.
GEORGE GALSTER is Clarence Hilberry Profes-
sor of Urban Affairs in the College of Urban, Labor,
and Metropolitan Affairs, Wayne State University,
Detroit, MI 48202. Email: George_Galster @Wayne.
edu. His research interests include neighborhood dy-
namics, segregation by race and class, and metropol-
itan opportunity structures.
ROYCE HANSON is a research professor in the
Institute of Public Policy, George Washington
University, Washington, DC 20052. E-mail: rhanson
@gwu.edu. His research interests include urban and
regional policy, politics, and development.
MICHAEL RATCLIFFE is chief of the Geographic
Standards and Criteria Branch, Geography Division,
U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC 20233. E-mail:
michael.r.ratcliffe@census.gov. His research interests
The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl: Which Land Should Be Considered? 105
include census and statistical geography concepts and ANDREA SARZYNSKI is an urban policy Ph.D.
criteria. student in the School of Public Policy and Public Ad-
ministration at George Washington University,
KIMBERLY FURDELL is a doctoral student at the Washington, DC 20052. Email: apsarzyn@gwu.edu.
School of Public Policy and Public Administration Her research interests include comparative urban/re-
at George Washington University, Washington, DC gional policy and the processes of sprawl and regional
20052. E-mail: kfurdell@gwu.edu. Her research in- development.
terests include urban education and school finance.

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