Two maps and six charts take sprawl rankings to another level.

A couple months ago, Sarah Goodyear showed us a sprawl ranking of U.S. metros (and explained why we should care). Those rankings, based on a four-factor "Sprawl Index," do a good job capturing a snapshot of sprawl in time. What they can't do is speak more directly to the recent policies a city has taken to change its growth pattern. They can see if the metro has sprawled, in other words, but not if it's sprawling.

A new report from Reid Ewing and Shima Hamidi of the University of Utah, lead researchers on the aforementioned rankings, gets at that question. Ewing and Hamidi scored the largest 162 U.S. urbanized areas on the Sprawl Index — or, if you're feeling optimistic, the Compactness Index — for 2010. (Urbanized areas reflect development better than fixed metro area boundaries do.) Then they applied the index to the same cities in 2000 to show the change over time. 

Here's the scene in 2000 (the darker the splotch, the more compact the area):

S. Hamidi, R. Ewing / Landscape and Urban Planning (2014)

And here it is in 2010:

S. Hamidi, R. Ewing / Landscape and Urban Planning (2014)

Unfortunately the individual city shifts are a bit hard to discern on the maps created by Ewing and Hamidi. So I took the report's supplemental data and calculated the change in the Sprawl-Compactness Index from 2000 to 2010 for all 162 urbanized areas. The results cast the earlier metro area rankings in a slightly different light....Continue Reading

> via citylab.com