ABSTRACT
Suburban sprawl, a relatively recent phenomenon, is among the most important urban policy issues facing contemporary cities, but a well-accepted rationale has not been settled on for explaining and managing the causes of sprawl. To move toward a micro-level explanation of sprawl’s origins, I develop a model for simulating the geographic dynamics of suburban sprawl and use it to explore the management of sprawl in three scenarios: a classic central city case, a polycentric urban development case, and the Midwestern megalopolis region centered on Chicago.
