Pattern-Based Evaluation of Peri-Urban Development in Delaware County, Ohio, USA: Roads, Zoning and Spatial Externalities

As urban areas continue to disperse and decentralize, new urban growth is increasingly occurring in peri-urban or rural areas beyond the suburban fringe, but within commuting distance of metropolitan areas. This trend is referred to in a variety of ways, including urban expansion, urban dispersion, or peri-urbanization. Many communities are concerned with seemingly uncontrolled urban sprawl and expansion into peri-urban areas for a variety of reasons, including the fiscal, environmental and social impacts associated with urban land-use change. Urbanization can alter major biogeochemical cycles, add or remove species, and have drastic effects on habitat (Vitousek et al. 1997), particularly when such development is low-density and scattered (Theobald 2004). Urban decentralization can also decimate the inner-city tax base (Downs 1999). Growth at the urban fringe, or in the rural portions of metropolitan counties, has greatly increased, and is of significantly lower density than the surrounding urbanized areas and clusters (Heimlich and Anderson, 2001). In Ohio, low-density development outside urbanized areas has increased from 58 to 72% of total land area between 1970 and 2000 (Partridge and Clark 2008).