The term "Urban Sprawl" is fairly commonly understood in the US, but may not be as well known in other places where less unsettled land is available for population growth. In some places, growth is "upward" much more than "outward," or in some places the only way to grow is mostly by replacement of existing housing and business by "higher density" constructs.
While not an intellectually challenging blast of informative matter, a rather cute display of urban sprawl is shown in a brief time-lapse sequence of Landsat images, covering a time span from 1972 to 2010 at Urban Sprawl in Vegas.
The link takes you to a brief text outline of what's shown, but you have to click on the video to see the "growth of the city." Sound with the 30 second video is limited to a "drumbeat" background, and wasn't loud and obnoxious, but you might want to mute before clicking if it might disturb the boss. (On my first click, for some reason it didn't show the "year" for each increment, but it did show on replay.)
Existence of similar views of other places is implied, but I haven't looked for the "system" as yet, to see what other places might be on show.
The obvious question, should discussion be appropriate, is "How does your town grow?".