Sprawl City

This website emerges from the work of environmental authors Leon Kolankiewicz and Roy Beck to help the public make more ready use of federal data on sprawl and rural land loss.

The philosophy of the website is this:

To be effective, anti-sprawl efforts must be targeted at the factors that are most responsible for the encroachment of cities and their suburbs on the surrounding rural land. The relative contributions of the factors must be understood if anti-sprawl resources are to be used efficiently and effectively. This website features U.S. government data and analysis of that data that allow the visitor to see the roles of contributing factors in the sprawl of individual urban areas, states, bio-regions and the nation as a whole.

Advisors*

Urban Planning Oversight:

Earl M. Starnes, Ph.D. professor emeritus, urban and regional planning, University of Florida

Eben Fodor urban planning consultant, Eugene (OR); author, Better not Bigger: How to Take Control of Urban Growth and Improve Your Community

Gabor Zovanyi, Ph.D professor of urban planning, Eastern Washington University

Robert Seaman associate professor of environmental science, New England College; executive committee, American Society of Civil Engineers' Urban and Development Division

Ruth Steiner, Ph.D. professor of urban and regional planning, University of Florida

Statistical Oversight

Alan J. Truelove, Ph.D. statistician, retired professor, University of the District of Columbia

Ben Zuckerman, Ph.D. professor of physics and astronomy, UCLA; member, UCLA Institute of the Environment

David Simcox director, Migration Demographics

Dick Schneider chair, Sierra Club Northern California Regional Sustainability Task Force

Leon Bouvier, Ph.D. demographer, Old Dominion University (VA)

Mark C. Thies, Ph.D., P.E. professor of chemical engineering, Clemson University

Marshall Cohen, Ph.D. professor emeritus of astronomy, California Institute of Technology

Paul Nachman, Ph.D. physicist

Scott Briles, Ph.D. engineer, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California

Steven A. Camarota, Ph.D. public policy analyst

William E. Murray, Jr., Ph.D. physicist

Environmental and General Oversight

Albert Bartlett, Ph.D. professor emeritus of physics, University of Colorado

Betty B. Davis, Ph.D. psychologist

Bill Smith, Ph.D. dean, College of Global Economics, EarthNet Institute

Craig Diamond adjunct faculty, environmental studies, Florida State University; technical advisor to the Sierra Club carrying capacity campaign

David Pimentel, Ph.D. professor of ecology and agricultural sciences, Cornell University

Diana Hull, Ph.D. behavioral scientist, retired, Baylor College of Medicine

Edward G. Di Bella adjunct faculty, Grossmont Community College (CA); president, Friends of Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve

Garrett Hardin, Ph.D.** professor emeritus of human ecology, University of California, Santa Barbara

George Wolford, Ph.D. president, EarthNet Institute

Herbert Berry, Ph.D. retired associate professor of computer information systems, Morehead State University (KY)

James G. McDonald attorney, civil engineer

Jeffrey Jacobs, Ph.D. National Academy of Sciences

John Bermingham former Colorado state senator

John Rohe attorney; board, Conservation News Service

Linda Thom retired government budget analyst, Santa Barbara County (CA)

Michael Hanauer member, Vision 2020, growth management project of Lexington, (MA)

Ross McCluney, Ph.D. principal research scientist, Florida Solar Energy Center, University of Central Florida

Steve Miller former Las Vegas councilman, Clark County (NV) Regional Transportation Commissioner

Stuart Hurlbert, Ph.D. professor of biology, San Diego State University

Terry Paulson Mayor Pro-tem, Aspen (CO) City Council

Tom Reitter Livermore (CA) City Council

* The affiliations of the Advisors are listed for identification purposes only; the views on this website do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions listed above or of all views of the Advisors.
** deceased

LEON KOLANKIEWICZ is a national environmental/natural resource planner and a former planner with the Orange County (CA) Environmental Management Agency. He has a B.S. in forestry and wildlife management from Virginia Tech and an M.S. in environmental planning and natural resources management from the University of British Columbia. He has worked as an environmental professional for more than two decades, including stints with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, University of Washington, University of New Mexico, and as a national parks technical advisor with the Peace Corps in Central America. He has written more than 70 articles and reports and is the author of Where the Salmon Come to Die: An Autumn on Alaska's Raincoast (Boulder, Colorado: Pruett, 1993).

ROY BECK is a Washington, D.C. public policy analyst and was one of the nation's first environment-beat newspaper reporters in the 1960s. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he won national awards during the 1970s for his coverage of urban expansion issues, including honors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Izaak Walton League. A former newspaper chain Washington correspondent, he is the author of four public policy books. His articles have appeared in scores of publications, including the Atlantic Monthly. He has lectured widely in the 1990s on the ethical aspects of U.S. population issues, including presentations for the National Conference on Applied Ethics, the Women's National Democratic Club and the Rockefeller lectures at Dartmouth. He is the director of NumbersUSA.com, an Internet organization that tracks the role of each Member of Congress in forcing or reducing U.S. population growth.