What’s the relationship between sprawling urban form, urban forest cover, and racial diversity? Can communities maintain racial diversity, or both grow denser and greener, in a broader context of regional sprawl? Surprisingly, there are few studies on these questions, since most urban sprawl research lacks fine-grain data about urban forests, which requires complex remote sensing data collection and processing. Furthermore, both the sprawl and urban forest literatures often ignore racial diversity, despite its clear relationship to urban form illustrated by continual discussions of white flight, gentrification, and the persistence of racial segregation.
The origin of this paper lay in a research collaboration with Josh Newell and Dimitrios Gounaridis from the U-M School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), which resulted in the development of novel dataset describing changes in urban form and forest cover in Southeast Michigan from 1985-2015, which required extensive original processing of aerial imagery and remote sensing (satellite) data. A paper we published in 2020 described changes across the regional landscape, and yielded a map showing urban growth hotspots. As a follow-up analysis, I had the idea of linking our new dataset with other measures of urban form and demographics, and conducting an analysis at the all-important jurisdiction level, where land use decisions and regulations are decided.
The result, is a paper that was published open access online today, “Diverse dynamics of urban sprawl: Examining changes in urban form, forest landscapes, and demographics across the Metropolitan Detroit region.” Starting as a collaboration with U-M Urban and Regional Planning PhD students Kat Conedera and Tilahun Mulatu in 2021, SEAS graduate student Ziwen Tan joined the team to help us complete the analysis. Here’s the paper abstract:
Urban growth in cities across the United States and the world has continued to follow the low-density pattern often called urban sprawl. Prior research has rarely linked changes in urban form, forest landscapes, and racial diversity, instead often analyzing these phenomena in isolation. This paper explores the relationships among variables in these categories through a hierarchical cluster analysis of the 231 local jurisdictions in the Metropolitan Detroit region in Michigan, USA, drawing from spatially-detailed metrics derived from remote sensing data from 1985 to 2015 and demographic data from 1990 to 2010. The analysis revealed patterns of change among these variables by identifying 10 clusters. The clusters describe communities evolving in both more sprawling and more sustainable trajectories, empirically documenting important local variations in development patterns across the region.
Some readers may notice that even though this paper uses the same seven-county region as the prior one, a geography typically called “Southeast Michigan,” we chose to use the term “Metropolitan Detroit,” in this paper. This risks causing confusion, since our study region contains no fewer than three U.S. Census/OMB Metropolitan Statistical Areas, since Washtenaw County and Monroe Counties are classified as independent MSAs due to the size of their central cities and a combination of local and regional commuting patterns, and the official Detroit MSA actually contains an additional county not in our analysis (Lapeer, which has commuting ties to both Flint and Detroit). Nonetheless, we felt that the patterns of urban sprawl and change we analyzed is best understood as taking place within a metropolitan context, which is obscured through the use of the potentially vague “Southeast Michigan.”
The paper is accompanied by a detailed Supplementary Materials file containing extensive methodological documentation, as well as a our dataset and two 3D visualizations hosted on an Open Science Foundation repository. In a follow-up post, I plan to highlight this data by sharing how communities in our dataset ranked on some of our variables. In the meantime, check out the paper here:
Goodspeed, R., Tan, Z., Conedera, K., & Mulatu, T. (2025). Diverse dynamics of urban sprawl: Examining changes in urban form, forest landscapes, and demographics across the Metropolitan Detroit region. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083251401679