Is there a relationship between urban form and the costs of providing public services?

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the dynamics of urban growth patterns and the public costs necessary to provide public services. The case study considers the central area of the Veneto Region, a territory of about 3,700 square km, occupied by 145 municipalities and with a total population of 2.1 million people. The paper compares the local public expenditures for the main services – obtained from the annual balance sheets of the municipalities of our sample in the years 1998 and 2007 – with the urban growth dynamics over the same time period. We have used three different satellite images (1984, 1998, and 2007) to detect the distribution of the built-up area, integrated with data from the cartographic land cover of the Veneto Region, and we have created an original algorithm for interpreting these images and quantifying the urbanized land. Based on the results of the geographical analysis, we have calculated different indicators for measuring and describing urban sprawl and urban density, implementing cluster analysis and principal component analysis. The same measures are also used in regression models as explanatory variables. We have run several panel data regression models and we find that urban form affects the public costs of providing local services to residents, but the role of the built-up environment depends on the type of services offered (for example, roadways and transport or environmental and land management) and on population density.