One of our alumni (Lara Engelfriet) contributed to an extensive urban sprawl study while working at the OECD. Using highly detailed spatial data the study quantifies the multiple dimensions of urban sprawl in a new set of indicators. The outcomes provide a new perspective to the nature of urban sprawl and its causes and environmental, social and economic consequences. VU-SPINlab advised on the selection of spatial data sets and programmed the python scripts to compute the different urban sprawl indicators for more than 1100 urban areas in 29 OECD countries over the period 1990-2014. The full, final report is available from the OECD.

Urban sprawl report OECD