Understanding the enemy: Defining correctly urban sprawl is the first step towards making it sustainable

what is a Metropolitan Area?  How to defined it? These are big questions appropiate to our times of  cities that grown until their limits cannot be defined clearly and become huge. 

This is a study about that uses the case of Quito, to answer How to Define a New Metropolitan Area? It begins by challenging the usual definition of Urban sprawl in the literature. Instead of being just a phenomenon that is "changing the landscape by increasing land consumption and forming conurbations with the nearest populated centers", the urban sprawl of the article based on the study of Quito, is "a new, broader and more complex metropolitan structure [...] linking [...] neighboring and conurbed areas to form a new metropolitan area". The study "interpreted satellite images, classified land uses, highlighted the main urban growth areas located outside, but contiguous to the administrative limit of Quito (1998 to 2017), analized demographics (densification of new urban peripheral areas) and the mobility links of population, goods and services between human settlements that allows the configuration of urban corridors and the integration of the territory." The results of this study will influence the strategies of urban planning aimed at sustainable development.

Please read the full article here:

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/4/413/pdf<br>