A century of decoupling size and structure of urban spaces in the United States

Abstract

Most cities in the United States of America are thought to have followed similar development trajectories to evolve into their present form. However, data on spatial development of cities are limited prior to 1970. Here we leverage a compilation of high-resolution spatial land use and building data to examine the evolving size and form (shape and structure) of US metropolitan areas since the early twentieth century. Our analysis of building patterns over 100 years reveals strong regularities in the development of the size and density of cities and their surroundings, regardless of timing or location of development. At the same time, we find that trajectories regarding shape and structure are harder to codify and more complex. We conclude that these discrepant developments of urban size- and form-related characteristics are driven, in part, by the long-term decoupling of these two sets of attributes over time.

Fine-grained, spatiotemporal datasets measuring 200 years of land development in the United States

“…This will potentially enable us to provide refined uncertainty estimates of even corrected datasets. Preliminary tests have shown promising results and that this issue has only minor effects on analytical outcomes ( Uhl et al, 2021 ). This said, by utilizing our uncertainty estimates, data users can incorporate uncertainty into their analyses and mitigate data discrepancies.…”

“…4.4.3 ). While the BUA surfaces have been employed for assessing long-term trends in land development ( Leyk et al, 2020 ) and for the multi-temporal analysis of urban form ( Uhl et al, 2021 ), they have not been published previously. These applications are evident from Fig.…”

“…We derived these counts from vast numbers of cadastral records contained in the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX; Zillow Inc., 2016 ). These additions to the HISDAC-US provide an important step beyond our previously published BUI surfaces: they enable reconstruction of fine-grained historical building densities for much of the United States and have applications illustrated in various research efforts leveraging the HISDAC-US to study urban geography ( Uhl et al, 2021 ), historical demography ( Leyk et al, 2020 ), road network evolution ( Boeing, 2020 ), population allocation ( Leyk et al, 2019 ), natural hazards and extreme events ( Balch et al, 2020 ; Iglesias and Travis, 2020 ; Mietkiewicz et al, 2020 ), landscape fragmentation ( Millhouser, 2019 ), and popular science ( Financial Times, 2020 ).…”

Combining Remote Sensing Derived Data and Historical Maps for Long-Term Back-Casting of Urban Extents

“…Hence, researchers studying long-term historical (urban) land development either rely on model-based approaches (e.g. [6,7]), on alternative data sources such as property data [8][9][10][11], or on the use of historical maps [12][13][14][15][16] that are mostly constrained to relatively small areas, such as specific cities, regions, or countries, often involving manual digitization work. This research explores the use of historical maps more specifically, as many countries have some form of historical map series and are able to derive knowledge related to urban areas prior to the 1970s.…”

“…We applied our method to six cities in four continents and thus four map products, dated between 1890 and 1960. We used historical builtup property data from the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the US (HISDAC-US) [8,76] as well as urban areas from the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) [6] to evaluate and cross-compare our results.…”