Supporting information (online component) for
"A global assessment of street-network sprawl"
Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball
PLoS One, Nov 2019
"Global trends towards urban street-network sprawl"
Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2020
"A high-resolution global time series of street-network sprawl"
Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2024
Here are the main papers and their two (long /detailed) Supplementary Information files:
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``A global assessment of street-network sprawl'' PLoS ONE, 14(11): doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0210091, November 2019. We define a new, globally-comparable index of street-network sprawl, and map it for the entire planet. We define a classification of street network types for geographic grid cells. We provide qualitative and quantitative validations for our measures.
Main paper (PDF)
Supplementary information (PDF)``Global trends towards urban street-network sprawl'' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1905232116 , January 2020. The pattern of new urban and residential roads represents an essentially permanent backbone that shapes new urban form and land use in the world’s cities. Thus, today’s choices on the connectivity of streets may restrict future resilience and lock in pathways of energy use and CO2 emissions for a century or more. In contrast to the corrective trend observed in the USA, where streets have become more connected since the late 20th century, we find that most of the world is building ever-more disconnected “street-network sprawl.” A rapid policy response, including regulation and pricing tools, is needed to avoid further costly lock-in during this current, final phase of the urbanization process.
Main paper (PDF)
Supplementary information (PDF)- "A high-resolution global time series of street-network sprawl" Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2025.
Our data are browsable in an interactive online map, Sprawlmap.org
There is a (prospectively) Frequently Asked Questions page for the map web site.
Open data sources
Our results are entirely reproducible using open access data, including OpenStreetMap.There are also a lot more data displayed in various ways in the Supplementary Information PDFs (above).
Data download (2025)
You can now download the micro-level data featured in our 2025 paper in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, as well as aggregated data. Any use of the data should cite that paper. The data also have their own DOI. For data dictionary and explanations, please refer to our OSF site, which is the official repository and service point for all the data. What follows is only a more convenient interface to choosing and downloading files from that data repository.
There are three types of data files, all in CSV or GPKG format. Below is a menu to help you choose. You can see all three of these data types integrated into the visual interface at Sprawlmap.org.Network data (nodes files and edges files)
You can select them below. Note that the "Rest of the world" file is a complement to the country-specific files. The sizes given are for the edge files; node files are about 1/3 the size.-
Regional aggregations according to political boundaries
GADM has up to five sub-national levels of administrative boundaries. You can download the data for each level below. All files span the whole planet.