Modelling urban sprawl patterns in binary raster maps

In urban studies the situation where an urban area develops in an inefficient manner is generally referred to as urban sprawl. This phenomenon leads to long-term negative effects for the environment, such as soil sealing, pollution and problems related to transport infrastructure. Offcial land use datasets, such as those from the CORINE Land Cover programme, provide a valuable resource to study urban dynamics. In this work we develop models for representing the urban sprawl phenomenon at a large spatial scale, which involves both estimating the proportion of urbanization over space and finding methods to quantify the urban shape.