Proceedings Volume 9688, Fourth International Conference on Remote Sensing and Geoinformation of the Environment (RSCy2016); 968816 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2240734 Sprawl in European urban areas Poulicos Prastacos* a , Apostolos Lagarias b a Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology- Hellas, N. Plastira 100, 71110 Heraklion, Greece; b Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, N. Plastira 100, 71110 Heraklion, Greece ABSTRACT In this paper the 2006 edition of the Urban Atlas database is used to tabulate areas of low development density, usually referred to as ―sprawl‖, for many European cities. The Urban Atlas database contains information on the land use distribution in the 305 largest European cities. Twenty different land use types are recognized, with six of them representing urban fabric. Urban fabric classes are residential areas differentiated by the density of development, which is measured by the sealing degree parameter that ranges from 0% to 100% (non-developed, fully developed). Analysis is performed on the distribution of the middle to low density areas defined as those with sealing degree less than 50%. Seven different country groups in which urban areas have similar sprawl characteristics are identified and some key characteristics of sprawl are discussed. Population of an urban area is another parameter considered in the analysis. Two spatial metrics, average patch size and mean distance to the nearest neighboring patch of the same class, are used to describe proximity/separation characteristics of sprawl in the urban areas of the seven groups. Keywords: Urban sprawl, low density development, European cities, Urban Atlas, sealing degree, spatial metrics 1. INTRODUCTION Urban sprawl is an issue that has been studied extensively in the last twenty years. It represents an imbalance between population growth and expansion of built up areas. Expansion of cities in the suburbs with density of built up areas considerably lower than those in the established centers results in increased car dependency, increased demand for infrastructure investments, increased energy consumption, increased demand for services and other networks, adverse environmental impacts and conversion of agricultural and open land into residential, office or retail buildings. It has been studied extensively in the United States, while in Europe research efforts have been more modest, probably because of the lack of extensive datasets and the rather late appearance of urban sprawl in Europe. For the rest of the world sprawl is also an important issue since urban areas in these countries are experiencing rapid population growth. Urban sprawl is driven by several factors, some representing economic realities and some changes in lifestyle and housing preferences. The exodus to the suburbs was driven by the high land use prices and lack of space in central areas while in suburban areas land was abundant and inexpensive, the rapid economic growth, the tertiarization of the economy, the information technology revolution and the construction of large commercial malls in the periphery. More recently, the aging of structures in older areas, the traffic congestion and sometimes the urban decay in some central city districts, have contributed to urban sprawl. Lifestyle changes that have affected sprawl in the latter half of the 20 th century include the demographics of the child boom generation, the increased emphasis on open space and green areas and others. Some of the theoretical works on sprawl include Brueckner (2001), Johnson (2001), Chin (2002), Couch et al. (2007), Decker (2011), while quantification/change detection analyses include Κasanko et.al (2006), ΕΕΑ (2006), Torrens (2006), Li et al. (2006), Schneider and Woodcock (2008), Jaeger and Schwick (2013), Yue et al. (2013) while land use policies to reduce sprawl are discussed in Halleuxa et al. (2012), Hennig et al. (2015). The objective of this paper is to identify sprawl areas in European cities, areas in which the density of development is low. In this respect it differs from other research efforts that compare population and developed land between two different points of time. It relies on data from Urban Atlas (UA, http://land.copernicus.eu/local/urban-atlas/urban-atlas- 2006) a database released a few years ago from the European Environment Agency (EEA, 2011) that provides land use information for the 305 largest EU cities. The database includes information for 20 different land use classes, 17 of which represent artificial land, land that has been developed/built-up. Six of these, referred to as urban fabric classes,