Researchers at a federal lab think they might be one step closer to understanding how urban sprawl happens. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has more:
Transcript
Researchers at a federal lab think they might be one step closer to
understanding how urban sprawl happens. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
If you can figure out why cities begin sprawling out of control, you
might be able to figure out how to better plan urban growth. That’s the
theory anyway. Based on that, researchers at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory have come up with a computer model that – based on
historical data – comes pretty close to predicting patterns of urban
sprawl. Steen Rasmussen is one of the researchers on the project. He
says in the model it comes down to terrain, what’s built on the land
right now, what’s close, and what’s within driving distance…
“And if you put that into a mathematical model, which is actually not very
much information, you get a pretty good description of what we observe
in the real world, how cities they grow and how they acquire the form they have.”
He says local planners can plug in their unique situations. But Rasmussen adds…
as long as people are making the decisions, it will be impossible to precisely predict patterns of urban sprawl.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.