Urban sprawl is the unplanned spreading of urban development out towards fringes of the city. Our visualization helps users understand the factors that influence urban sprawl, and what factors are common amongst cities with similar sprawl statistics. It consists of two linked parts: a scatterplot and a star plot.
See Appendix A for a glossary of all variables.
We use the dataset originally created for the article "Causes of Sprawl: A Portrait from Space", published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in May 2006. In particular, we make use of the companion website created by one of the article's authors, Diego Puga. His site contains a summary of the article, the CSV file we use that contains the raw data, and detailed descriptions of the data variables.