Debate regarding suburban sprawl in urban studies is contentious. It is fair to say that the phenomenon is not fully understood to satisfaction in the academic, policy, or planning communities and there are a host of reasons why this may be the case. Characterization of sprawl in the literature is often narrative and subjective. Measurement is piecemeal and largely data-driven. Existing studies yield contrary results for the same cities in many cases. The partial appreciation for the intricacies of sprawl is problematic. In practice, city planning agencies and citizen advocacy groups are scrambling to suggest and develop "smart growth" strategies to curb sprawl, without a strong empirical basis for measuring the phenomenon. Yet, sprawl is extremely popular with consumers.

In this project, we are developing an innovative approach to diagnosing sprawl, looking across the full range of its characteristic attributes in a comprehensive fashion that is robust to some well-known challenges. This proves to be very useful in sweeping the parameter space of the phenomenon, enabling the visualization and valuation of sprawl surfaces across attributes, allowing us to check the pulse of a developing city. We have already applied the work to some well-known, but controversial exemplars of American sprawl, with the surprising result that sprawl and "smart growth" are found to co-exist and co-evolve. This raises questions about relationships between the two, with consequences for planning and public policy.

We have developed a 42-metric empirical scheme as foundation for an extensible toolkit for measuring sprawl:

Local hotspots and coolspots of population density

Population density surfaces

Accessibility to the the city's top-500 employers

Accessibility to the city's central business district

A toolkit for measuring sprawl

Modeling time, space, and behavior

Simulating crowd behavior

Wi-Fi mapping and geography