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Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) is a growth management policy that designates specific areas where growth should be concentrated in order to avoid urban sprawl. The objective of such a boundary is to protect agricultural land, open spaces and the natural environment, as well as to use existing infrastructure and public services more efficiently. Due to the inherent heterogeneity and complexity of settlements, UGBs in Germany are currently created manually by experts. Therefore, every dataset is linked to a specific area, investigation period and dedicated use. Clearly, up-to-date, homogeneous, meaningful and cost-efficient delineations created automatically are needed to avoid this reliance on manually or semi-automatically generated delineations. Here, we present an aggregative method to produce UGBs using building footprints and generally available topographic data as inputs. It was applied to study areas in Frankfurt/Main, the Hanover region and rural Brandenburg while taking full account of Germany’s planning and legal framework for spatial development. Our method is able to compensate for most of the weaknesses of available UGB data and to significantly raise the accuracy of UGBs in Germany. Therefore, it represents a valuable tool for generating basic data for future studies. Application elsewhere is also conceivable by regionalising the employed parameters.

Monitoring urban growth and measuring urban sprawl is essential for improving urban planning and development. In this paper, we introduce a supervised approach for the delineation of urban areas using commonly available topographic data and commercial GIS software. The method uses a supervised parameter optimization approach along with buffer-based quality measuring method. The approach was developed, tested and evaluated in terms of possible usage in monitoring built-up areas in spatial science at a very fine-grained level. Results show that built-up area boundaries can be delineated automatically with higher quality compared to the settlement boundaries actually used. The approach has been applied to 166 settlement bodies in Germany. The study shows a very efficient way of extracting settlement boundaries from topographic data and maps and contributes to the quantification and monitoring of urban sprawl. Moreover, the findings from this study can potentially guide policy makers and urban planners from other countries.