This book describes how specific modifications in patterns of land development could help reduce greenhouse exhaust gases from vehicles. The book is based on a thorough review of dozens of studies by leading researchers in urban planning. It finds that urban development is both a major contributor to climate change and an essential factor in conquering it. The authors argue the premise that one of the best methods of reducing vehicle travel is development that is compact and condensed in nature. Such development would construct places in which people can navigate from place to place without driving. This kind of development includes pedestrian friendly development and mixed use development. There is a developing demand for smaller lots and homes, and condominiums and townhouses nears jobs and activity centers, which are fueled by rising gasoline prices, shrinking households, lengthening work trip commuting, and changing demographics. Existing government regulations and policies reward automobile dependent and sprawling development. The book offers recommendations for making green neighborhoods more affordable and available.

https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/17370/dot_17370_DS1.pdf

Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change

The influence of urban form on GHG emissions in the U.S. household sector

A longitudinal study of changes in urban sprawl between 2000 and 2010 in the United States

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of spatial trends in six U.S. metropolitan areas. The results show that generalized job dispersion was a more common spatial process than subcentering during the 1980s and 1990s when jobs continued to decentralize from the metropolitan core to the suburbs. Three distinctive patterns of spatial development were found. Job dispersion was predominant in Portland and Philadelphia, whereas the polycentricity of Los Angeles and San Francisco was further reinforced. New York and Boston with large and long-established CBDs were less prone to decentralization. Each metro seems to have developed a unique pattern of decentralization in light of their histories and circumstances, which has limited the growth of commuting times.

/pdf/edge-or-edgeless-cities-urban-spatial-structure-in-u-s-3bxayi74mz.pdf

“edge” or “edgeless” cities? urban spatial structure in u.s. metropolitan areas, 1980 to 2000*

In 1997, the Journal of the American Planning Association published a pair of point–counterpoint articles now listed by the American Planning Association as “classics” in the urban planning literat...

Compactness versus Sprawl: A Review of Recent Evidence from the United States

: Twelve conceptually distinct dimensions of land use patterns are operationalized for 50 large US metropolitan areas using a battery of indices. Common patterns of variation in these indices across metropolitan areas are discerned using correlation and factor analyses. We find that: (1) seven principal components best summarize the dimensions of housing and employment land uses, (2) metro areas often exhibit both high and low levels of sprawl-like patterns across the seven components, and (3) housing and employment aspects of sprawl-like patterns differ in nature. Thus, land use patterns prove multi-dimensional in both theory and practice. Exploratory analyses indicate: (1) little regional variation in land use patterns, (2) metro areas with larger populations are more dense/continuous with greater housing centrality and concentration of employment in the core, (3) older areas have higher degrees of housing concentration and employment in the core, (4) constrained areas evince greater density/continuity, and (5) inter-metropolitan variations in several dimensions of land use patterns are not well explained by population, age, growth patterns, or topographical constraints on development. Results imply that policymakers must carefully unravel which land use dimension is causing undesirable outcomes, and then devise precise policy instruments to change only this dimension.

Douglas Towns

Papers

Verifying the Multi-Dimensional Nature of Metropolitan Land Use: Advancing the Understanding and Measurement of Sprawl