Sustainable Urban Form .. Compact City or Sprawl? (original) (raw)
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Sustainable development is one of the greatest challenges to urban planning in the 21st century. Current patterns of urban development, called byspecially sprawl, and human activity have led to environmental degradation and created a serious threat to continued human existence and sustainability of life on earth. The United States, concerns over consequences of urban sprawl have led to increased advocacy for more compact and traditional urban development. The compact city is now widely accepted as the most effective solution to sustainable urban form. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between sustainability and urban form. In order to achieve the aims of this study, 50 cities in the United States are analyzed and compared with the 2008 sustainable city rankings from the organization SustainLane, using four categories of urban form indicators: densities, mode of commute to work, mean travel time to work & traffic congestion cost, and planning & land use. This r...
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2006
The EPA (2001) concludes in Our Built and Natural Environments that the urban form directly affects habitat, ecosystems, endangered species, and water quality through land consumption, habitat fragmentation, and replacement of natural cover with impervious surfaces. In addition, urban form affects travel behavior, which, in turn, affects air quality; premature loss of farmland, wetlands, and open space; soil pollution and contamination; global climate; and noise (Cervero 1998, 43-48). Moreover, growing evidence from around the world indicates that, owing to our excessive use of fossil fuels, especially in affluent countries, greenhouse gas concentrations are accumulating at an alarming rate. Prospects for the future are dire indeed, unless we act collectively to alter our energy-dependent lifestyles. Urgent changes are needed not only in our behavior but also in the design of the built form. The emergence of "sustainable development" as a popular concept (see Jabareen 2004) has revived discussion about the form of cities. Undoubtedly, it has motivated and provoked scholars and practitioners in different disciplines to seek forms for human settlements that will meet the requirements of sustainability and enable built environments to function in a more constructive way than at present. The concept of sustainable development has given a major stimulus to the question of the contribution that certain urban forms might make to lower energy consumption and lower pollution levels (U.K. Department of the Environment [DoE] 1996; Breheny 1992a, 138). This challenge has induced scholars, planners, local and international NGOs, civil societies, and governments to propose supposedly new frameworks for the redesigning and restructuring of urban places to achieve sustainability. These approaches have been addressed on different spatial levels: (1) the regional and metropolitan levels,
Ecological sustainability and urban form
2001
One controversial idea present in the debate on urban sustainability is that urban sprawl is an ecological stressing problem. We have tested this popular assumption by measuring the ecological footprint of commuting and housing of the 163 municipalities of the Barcelona Metropolitan Region and by relating the estimated values with residential density and accessibility, the fundamental determinant of residential density according to the Monocentric City Model.
Sustainable cities: The relationships between urban built forms and density indicators
Cities, 2019
The paper introduces a novel indicator of urban built form termed Form Signature. Generic models of four urban built forms are developed, including pavilion, terrace, court and a newly introduced tunnel-court is used to compare and contrast their land-use performance and density characteristics. Selecting plot ratio and site coverage as the most popular and appropriate density indicators, the simultaneous relationship to each of the considered urban built forms is shown graphically with the number of storeys, plan depth and cutoff angle as the main variables of interest. For existing urban areas, the resulting graphs provide a robust tool for statistical analysis of contexts such as climate, economy, energy and crime potential and establish their relationship to form and density. To show the value of the contribution, analysing 32 case studies from 19 cities in different global locations showed an insignificant relationship between climate and form/density of urban areas, whilst practically depicting that urban areas built in court form acquire higher cutoff angle compared to terrace form urban developments. For planning the future urban areas, the resulting relationships provide application-oriented urban planning tool to facilitate the most effective land-use method in order to achieve sustainable cities. Examples showing the potential of the tool for future statistical energy and social analysis of urban areas are provided. Finally, a relative comparison shows that the newly-introduced tunnel-court form achieves the greatest density while pavilion achieves the lowest.
9° Congresso Città e Territorio Virtuale, Roma, 2, 3 e 4 ottobre 2013
It is commonly asserted that so-called compact development is the urban form most able to sustainably accommodate growth by reducing travel distances and conserving land, but credible supportive evidence remains limited. This study rigorously and realistically tested the relative performance of spatial options over the next 30 years for three distinct kinds of English city regions. Statistical models first forecast the behavior of people within interacting markets for land and transport. These outputs were then fed to established simulation models to generate 26 indicators measuring the economic efficiency, resource use, social and environmental impact of the spatial options. This permitted an explicit comparison of the costs and benefits of compact against sprawling urban forms for these regions. While the prototypes - i.e. Compaction, Market led development (sprawl), Planned expansion (edge expansion and/or new towns) - were indeed found to differ in their sustainability, no one f...
Planning for a Sustainable Compact City: A Way Forward
WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 2020
Cities are the engines of economic growth. The concentration of population in urban settlements is a result of the centralization of resources and triggers in-migration. Sprawl, congestion, increasing densities, and social exclusion are the major urban challenges faced by the cities of the developing world. At this juncture, it is important for planners to address these issues to make the cities liveable. The compact city concept is one of the concepts to address similar problems faced by the developing world. Implementation of the compact city concept is limited to an increase in density, redistribution of density, implement transit-oriented development schemes, and mixed uses of the land resource in existing practices. The compact city concept is widely discussed and debated due to its benefits and costs with respect to sustainable urban development. This paper aims to conduct an in-depth study on the sustainable compact city concept by taking into account the literature available from various contexts around the world. The paper investigates the existing methodologies and proposes the optimal methodology for sustainable compact city planning.
Compactness is Not Enough: Development and Trends of a Sustainable Urban Concept
Architecture and Urban Planning
The changing concept of sustainable development is changing the practice of designing sustainable urban forms. The article presents a variety of concepts of a sustainable urban form and their ambiguous assessment – the model of a compact city, if applied in all cases, can cost the quality of one’s environment and the quality of life. New bottom-up trends are emerging in theory and in practice of the 21st century, which focus on the urban planning process which is more inclusive in terms of society. The article discusses examples of the creation of a sustainable urban narrative for the development of a relationship with the community.
Urban Science
Urban compactivity models are increasing around the globe, and sustainability has become the new buzzword. In recent decades, the focus of ecological responsibility has been shifted to the world’s cities, as they are the source of excessive consumption, major waste production, social inequalities, and global imbalances of economic wealth. This literature review is a contribution to the exploration of compactivity models that urgently aim at more sustainable forms of urban land-use, habitation, and transportation and considers: (i) compact cities; (ii) the 15-minute city; (iii) eco-villages/urban villages; (iv) transit oriented development; and (v) transit-corridor-livability. In the second section, we will address the debate on the need for governing authorities and the interdependence between micro-, meso- and macro dynamics for the implementation of transformational plans on a longue-durée. The work will be concluded with the presentation of a set of questions for exploring the ne...