Transportation and Land Use Patterns in European Cities

I plan to use remote sensing and GIS tools to quantify how transportation policies and infrastructure dictate or influence the layout of human settlement and land use in urban landscapes. The ongoing trend of suburban sprawl in the United States has been extensively discussed and researched in recent years, and I would like to compare this trend in American cities with the urban centers in other parts of the world where automobile-based transportation does not dominate the city to the same degree. I will use remote sensing and GIS to create and explore a comparative analysis of sprawl/density patterns in cities with different transportation policies and histories.