Banai's Research Featured in Sciendo 

Urban sprawl and blight »

Dr. Reza Banai, professor of City and Regional Planning in collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Earth Sciences, is lead investigator and author of a paper titled “ Mapping the morphology of sprawl and blight: A note on entropy”, and was recently featured in the journal Sciendo. As noted in the article, the urban expansion of Memphis is measured by entropy and GIS-aided mapping that characterize the sprawl pattern in detail at the Census-block level, useful for neighborhood-level planning and policy-making to counter sprawl. As shown, statistical models show how sprawl is related to blight. The undesirable consequences of urban sprawl are, among them, blight with the city’s outward expansion, entrapping low-income residents with limited mobility and access to employment opportunities in the inner city. Blight decays with distance from the city center and, as income increases, blight decreases.

The aim of the journal is to establish a common platform for the publication of research on ecological and environmental issues, social dimension of sustainability, economic geography and regional development, cross-border cooperation and political strategies influencing the landscape, spatial planning, regional development and policies at different scales. The inter-disciplinarity is strongly encouraged. In all its content the journal accentuates the practical implications of the research for public administration, planning, and regional development. Therefore, ideally, the papers discuss the relevance of the methodical procedures and of the results for the respective fields.

Read the full article here. For more information on his research, contact Banai at rbanai@memphis.edu.