Urban sprawl and the cost of providing local public services: Empirical evidence for Brazilian municipalities

Abstract

Urban sprawl is a pattern of growth observed in some big and medium cities which could increase the cost of providing public services by municipalities and thus affect welfare and quality of life for urban residents. This paper analyses the effects of urban sprawl on the cost of providing public services for the medium-density and high-density Brazilian urban centres. We investigate the role of different measures of urban sprawl into equations of public good provision using spatial econometric techniques. Our empirical evidence shows that the main public services affected by urban sprawl are education, health, and social assistance, urban infrastructure and culture, and sports. Also, the results are sensitive to the urban sprawl measure used and the relation between urban sprawl and the cost of providing local public services has a threshold effect associated with the size of the urban centre.

Morphometric Indicators for the Definition of New Territorial Units in the Periurban Space: Application to the Metropolitan Area of Valencia (Spain)

“…Despite this, the processes of growth of this phenomenon have been maintained, and some of the urban planning policies implemented to improve the quality of cities, such as the planning of green spaces and green corridors, may even have contributed to its increase. The process takes different forms depending on socio-economic environments [26], and is not always linked to urban growth, but can also be found in areas of demographic regression [27]. According to several authors [28,29], urban growth operates according to three main possibilities: infill, edge-expansion, and leapfrog, the latter two being characterized as sprawl.…”

“…Moreover, other authors have related spatial patterns and the cost of municipal public services, identifying the expenditure items most affected by overspending and relating them to different indicators of spatial dispersion dimensions of concentration, centrality, and local proximity between land uses [1,12,26]. The results indicate that the effects on the local economy depend on the dispersion dimension considered, suggesting that the spatial configuration of cities affects local finances in different ways.…”