Comparing urban sprawl patterns with the costs of providing public services: a time series analysis

The aims of this paper is to show the relationship between the dynamics of urban growth patterns and the public costs necessary to provide public services in order to find out if the different urban forms may affect local public spending. The case study area is located in the central area of the Veneto Region, it covers an area of about 3,700 square km and it is composed by 145 municipalities, which are part of the administrative provincial territory of Padua, Treviso, Venice and Vicenza. Our paper aims to compare the costs of public services coming from the annual balance sheets of the different municipalities included in our sample with urban growth dynamics based on two different temporal patterns (1998, 2007). Geographical elaborations are obtained with unsupervised analysis of satellite images; the multitemporal analysis integrates the data of Landsat images classification and of Cartographic land cover of the Veneto Region.