Abstract
The management of urban sprawl is fundamental to achieving sustainable urban development. Monitoring
urban sprawl is, however, challenging. This study proposes the use of two spatial statistics, namely global
Moran and local Moran to indentify statistically significant urban sprawl hot and cold spots. The findings
reveal that the Moran indexes are sensitive to the distance band spatial weight matrices employed and that
multiple bands should be used when these indexes are used. The authors demonstrate how the indexes can
be used in combination with various visualisation methods to support planning decisions.