A spatio-temporal view of historical growth in Phoenix, Arizona, USA

• We examine the growth trajectory of parcels in downtown Phoenix between 1915 and 1963.
• Parcels are placed in categories and analyzed to link change processes to landscape pattern.
• Results indicate land use homogenization; parcels of all types are likely to become like their neighbors.
• Despite downtown decline, nuisance parcels are decreasingly likely to be near higher-order land uses.
• This historical approach provides a new view of the rapidly growing, polycentric metropolis.

This study uses a spatio-temporal approach to analyze the historical development of Phoenix, Arizona. While historical narratives provide rich detail, there is also a strong quantitative tradition in urban growth research. Methods from urban growth models, ecological modeling, and spatial analysis provide sharper intuition into the effect that urban change processes have on the growth trajectory of individual land parcels and the entire urban landscape. Phoenix, Arizona is a popular case study for urban growth because of its rapid, decentralized expansion and the hegemony of its suburbs and outlying areas. It is often seen as the epitome of post-World War II suburban sprawl. We digitize parcel maps of downtown Phoenix from 1915, 1949, and 1963 in order to investigate the impact of regional change processes on the city's historic core. Using transition matrices, join-count autocorrelation, and spatial Markov chains, we find that the purported emptying out of the downtown area following World War II was more complex than the common story of retail exodus. Despite an increase in so-called nuisance properties and poor institutional land use controls, nuisance parcels showed a propensity toward aggregation and were less likely to exist in close proximity to higher order uses. Finally, we find that Phoenix's downtown is continually homogenizing by land use type. This paper provides a parcel-level view of the impacts that drivers of change have on urban landscapes, demonstrating the usefulness of spatio-temporal approaches in understanding the development of an urban morphology during a critical period of urban change worldwide.