THE DETERMINATION OF FACTORS CAUSING THE URBAN SPRAWL IN OPEN SPACE

The residential and commercial urbanization has a significant tendency to influence the changes in open space. As a consequence to this phenomenon, the main land use types transformed by urban development are farmland or forest areas which are very important parts of our open space. These changes influence the commercial and non commercial functions      of the open space and are irreversible. As the most urgent problems of urban sprawl are for example considered the decrease of food production, the changes in local hydrological systems, the loss of spatial heterogeneity of the landscape or the change of landscape character.¹

The urbanization process is dominant around Europe, nevertheless it has the irregular tendencies. The development pressure put on open space is in several levels of different administrative units. As the causes of the development growths, different factors are considered, such as the price and quality of farmland, the distance from urban centres, environmental qualities of landscape, the character of neighbouring landscape or the economic potentiality of the region. ² Although, there still remains the question which factors are truly responsible for the urban growth in open space.

The main objective of this research is to determine factors that really cause the urban development between different administrative units. The second objective is to measure the urban growth by using Geographical Information System (GIS). The GIS analyses are based on the current aerial photos which are compared to the aerial photos from 1990s. The results of the analyses have the information about the increased areas of urban development. The gathered data are the inputs into the statistical analyses. The statistical testing of the determined factors verifies their impacts on the urbanized landscape.

All data are gathered from several administrative units in the Czech Republic. The data are sorted into 4 classes by the number of inhabitants in the selected areas and they are comprised of development, economic, environmental, landscape and social analyses. The basic statistic data were gained from the Czech Statistical Office (CZSO).