Two centuries of settlement and urban development in the United States

Abstract

Over the past 200 years, the population of the United States grew more than 40-fold. The resulting development of the built environment has had a profound impact on the regional economic, demographic, and environmental structure of North America. Unfortunately, constraints on data availability limit opportunities to study long-term development patterns and how population growth relates to land-use change. Using hundreds of millions of property records, we undertake the finest-resolution analysis to date, in space and time, of urbanization patterns from 1810 to 2015. Temporally consistent metrics reveal distinct long-term urban development patterns characterizing processes such as settlement expansion and densification at fine granularity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these settlement measures are robust proxies for population throughout the record and thus potential surrogates for estimating population changes at fine scales. These new insights and data vastly expand opportunities to study land use, population change, and urbanization over the past two centuries.

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

“…5g). Historical developments such as these, which have been and will be the focus of ongoing research efforts 31,49 , undergird many of the broader patterns we observe here. While we do not attempt to grapple with these issues in this study, the approaches we articulate provide vast opportunities for enhanced understanding of the complex social, political and economic interactions that have brought about widespread historical spatial change.…”

“…Furthermore, forthcoming work should include additional spatial and temporal characteristics (e.g., differential measures such as expansion and densification of urban areas 31 ), measures of intra-or peri-urban land use and vegetation, urban road networks, and census data (e.g., population, migration and other socio-economic variables). These data integration approaches in combination with advanced machine learning methods could enable predictive modelling of urban development and population changes.…”

“…In answering this question, our goal is to determine the consistency and variance of long-term urban spatial development with respect to city size, density, shape and structure. We do so by leveraging our recently published Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the US (HISDAC-US) [28][29][30][31] derived from the Zillow Transaction and Assessment dataset (ZTRAX) 32 to examine urban spatial development within contemporary metropolitan statistical areas (hereafter "MSAs") in terms of size, density, shape, and structure related metrics 33,34 . ZTRAX is a compilation of land use, built, valuation and real-estate characteristics for over 200 million US cadastral parcels, and contains rarely examined building attributes, including the year built, indoor area, total housing units, and structural characteristics (e.g., building material, function).…”

Settlement–river relationship and locality of river-related built environment

“…However, most of the existing studies regarding settlement-river relationships and locality are based on typical cases or special historical periods, and can be categorised by locality types, structures and evolution. Constrained by satellite technology, which first began in the 1970s, and the absence of consistent and detailed historical information, fine-grained and high spatial resolution data 43 are difficult to obtain without a lack of continuity in a given period. These limitations pose challenges for research regarding long-term and large-scale dynamic evolution 15 while simultaneously providing the opportunity for a potential breakthrough.…”

The River Corridor's Evolving Connectivity of Lotic and Lentic Waters

“…Human alterations of the river corridor over the past century added substantial areas of reservoirs and small ponds to serve needs for a ready water supply, hydropower production, farm use, as well as stormwater control to reduce nutrient runoff and sedimentation of waterways, and to lower flood risk (Doyle, 2012;Wohl, 2013;Bellmore et al, 2017;Foley et al, 2017;Leyk et al, 2020). The sharp increase in fertilizer and chemical use after World War II substantially increased chemical concentrations in U.S. rivers (Raymond et al, 2008).…”