Calculating spatial urban sprawl indices using open data

Urban sprawl has been related to numerous negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Meanwhile, urban areas have been growing at alarming rates, urging for assessing sprawl towards sustainable development. However, sprawl is an elusive term and different approaches to measure it have lead to heterogeneous results. Moreover, most studies rely on pri-vate/commercial data-sets and their software is rarely made public, impeding research reproducibility and comparability. Furthermore, many works give as result a unique value for a region of analysis, dismissing local spatial diversity that is vital for urban planners and policy makers. We present in this paper an open source framework for assessing urban sprawl using open data. Locations of residential and activity units are used to measure mixed use development and built-up dispersion, whereas the street network is used to measure accessibility between different land uses. Sprawl patterns are identified, and the resulting spatial information allows focusing on particular neighborhoods for a fine-grained analysis, as well as visualizing each sprawl dimension separately.