Urban growth management has become a common term to circumscribe strategies and tools to regulate urban land use in metropolitan areas. It is particularly used to counteract negative impacts of urban sprawl but also to frame future urban development. We discuss recent challenges of urban growth in 6 European and 2 US American city-regions. The paper compares the urban development focusing on a quantification of drivers and effects of urban growth and a qualitative analysis of the applied urban growth management tools. We build our analysis on findings from the EU-FP6 project PLUREL. The cities have different success in dealing with urban growth pressure - some can accommodate most growth in existing urban areas and densify, others expand or sprawl. Urban growth management is no guarantee to contain urban growth, but the case studies offer some innovative ways how to deal with particular challenges.