Sprawl or No Sprawl? - A Quantitative Analysis for the City of Vienna

Urban sprawl has been a hotly debated issue in urban development policy in recent decades. The discussion originated in the U.S.A. and has been transferred to Europe in recent years. In this paper we use existing quantitative measures that have been applied to other cities as well to generate indicators for whether or not urban sprawl is an important problem for the city of Vienna. The analysis clearly shows that the city has become less densely populated in the last 30 years. However, when comparing our results with those of other cities we see that Vienna scores quite favorably on practically all sprawl indicators.