This study investigates urbanization and its potential environmental consequences in Shanghai andStockholm metropolitan areas over two decades. Changes in land use/land cover are estimated fromsupport vector machine classifications of Landsat mosaics with grey-level co-occurrence matrix fea-tures. Landscape metrics are used to investigate changes in landscape composition and configurationand to draw preliminary conclusions about environmental impacts. Speed and magnitude of urbaniza-tion is calculated by urbanization indices and the resulting impacts on the environment are quantified byecosystem services. Growth of urban areas and urban green spaces occurred at the expense of croplandin both regions. Alongside a decrease in natural land cover, urban areas increased by approximately 120%in Shanghai, nearly ten times as much as in Stockholm, where the most significant land cover changewas a 12% urban expansion that mostly replaced agricultural areas. From the landscape metrics results,it appears that fragmentation in both study regions occurred mainly due to the growth of high densitybuilt-up areas in previously more natural/agricultural environments, while the expansion of low densitybuilt-up areas was for the most part in conjunction with pre-existing patches. Urban growth resulted inecosystem service value losses of approximately 445 million US dollars in Shanghai, mostly due to thedecrease in natural coastal wetlands while in Stockholm the value of ecosystem services changed very lit-tle. Total urban growth in Shanghai was 1768 km2and 100 km2in Stockholm. The developed methodologyis considered a straight-forward low-cost globally applicable approach to quantitatively and qualitativelyevaluate urban growth patterns that could help to address spatial, economic and ecological questions inurban and regional planning.