Development of a composite index of urban compactness for land use modelling applications (original) (raw)
Related papers
A local and regional spatial index for measuring three-dimensional urban compactness growth
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
The negative impacts resulting from urban sprawl are recognized as serious issues entailing environmental problems. Urban developments are moving towards a more compact form to mitigate many issues including pollution concerns, land depletion, and population growth demands. Urban compactness has been reported to be a more sustainable form of development that occurs through densification and mixed land use practices through spatial indicators that intensify the landscape. Urban modeling has been used extensively to aid in urban and regional planning as it can forecast possible scenarios of urban growth. The objective of this research is to develop and implement a spatial index for three-dimensional (3D) urban compactness to evaluate potential vertical development growth. The spatial index has two components, local and regional, and it is derived based on parameters accounting for a vertical urban growth suitability analysis, land designation, and average building height. Datasets use...
Patterns of urban compactness: indicators of balance between built-up area and voids
Current Urban Studies, 2023
An effective response to the current international and EU guidelines of limiting land consumption and desirable reversal of the phenomenon, is possible for Italy only if it succeeds in setting up centralized regional direction structures for settlement transformations and working on operational planning tools. Precisely at this level, a different control of classic urban planning parameters will have to be expressed, centering attention on the relationship between built-up areas and property areas (coverage ratio) and orienting it to support urban design from a soil-saving perspective. This should apply in all homogeneous zones covered in Italian planning, with a decisive revision of current models. The paper examines the possibilities of technical action in this direction by simulating land-saving solutions corresponding to the progressive reduction of areas committed to construction and formulating proposals to strategically better regulate urbanization arrangements.
Characterising urban concentration and land-use diversity in simulations of future land use
The Annals of Regional Science, 2008
This paper presents two sets of functional indicators that were implemented and tested for the assessment of spatial aspects of future land-use configurations as simulated by a land-use model. This is potentially useful for the ex-ante evaluation of spatial planning policies. The indicators were applied in a Dutch case study and relate to two important themes in Dutch spatial planning: compact urbanisation and mixing of land uses. After a short introduction of these themes, the sets of indicators are presented which are used for their evaluation. These indicators are applied to simulations based on two scenarios for land-use development in the Netherlands up to 2030. After a discussion of the results we conclude that the combined application of land-use models and indicators produces new and potentially useful information for policy makers, although both the model and the associated indicators are still in a state of development.
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2011
Urban growth patterns are characteristic of spatial changes that take place in metropolitan areas (MA). They are particularly prominent in more recently formed MAs, such as those in certain locations in Spain, where the structure of the traditional city has undergone sweeping changes. Given the capacity of spatial metrics to characterize landscape structure, these metrics can be a valuable instrument to identify growth patterns in MAs and to evaluate possible urban growth options, based on spatial characteristics.This article focuses on a medium-sized MA (Granada, Spain), and explores the use of spatial metrics to quantify changes in the urban growth patterns reflected in three future scenarios (2020). The scenarios were simulated with a model based on cellular automata, which reproduced three urban growth processes (aggregation, compaction, and dispersion) and four urban growth patterns (aggregated, linear, leapfrogging, and nodal). The scenarios were evaluated with metrics that quantified changes in the spatial characteristics of urban processes. Thus, for example, the NP and AREA_MN allowed us to characterize the decreased aggregation of high-density residential land uses in one scenario (S1) and the linear growth patterns in industrial land uses in another scenario (S2). In this way, spatial metrics were found to be useful for the evaluation of urban planning.▶ Using a model based on cellular automata we simulated three future scenarios. ▶ A set of spatial metrics was selected to measure simulated urban growth form. ▶ This set allowed us to determine spatial characteristics and patterns simulated. ▶ The results were used to assess the scenarios.
Urban Science, 2024
Assuming that settlement morphologies and landscape structures are the result of economic transformations, the present study illustrates a statistical framework investigating metropolitan growth due to the inherent changes in landscape configurations vis à vis socio-demographic functions. Focusing on the evolution of their spatial drivers over time, metropolitan development was studied by adopting land parcels (or ‘patches’, as they are referred to in the ecological literature) as the elementary analysis unit—with the individual surface area and a specific shape indicator as the dependent variables and background socioeconomic attributes as predictors of landscape change over time. We specifically ran a Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) testing the spatial dependence of the size and shape of landscape parcels on a vast ensemble of socioeconomic factors in a dense region (metropolitan Athens, Greece) with natural landscapes exposed to increasing human pressure. To investigate the spatial direction and intensity of the settlement expansion and landscape change, local regressions using the parcel area and fractal index (perimeter-to-area ratio) as the dependent variables and the elevation, distance from selected economic nodes, transport infrastructures, and natural amenities as the predictors were run separately for 1990 and 2018, representative of, respectively, a mono-centric configuration and a moderately polycentric organization of economic spaces. In a strictly mono-centric setting (1990), the parcel size showed a linear dependence on the distance from business districts, elevation, and wealth. Changes in the relationship between the parcel size and spatial (economic and non-economic) drivers may suggest a latent process of settlement de-concentration, and a possible shift toward polycentric development (2018), as documented in earlier studies. By integrating socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of landscape analysis and land evaluation, the empirical results of this study outline the increased complexity of dispersed landscape structures within dense metropolitan regions and along urban–rural gradients in Europe.
Urban permeation of landscapes and sprawl per capita: New measures of urban sprawl
Ecological Indicators, 2010
Urban sprawl (dispersed urban development) has increased at alarming rates in Europe and North America over the last 50 years. Quantitative data are urgently needed in monitoring systems for sustainable development. However, there is a lack of reliable measures of urban sprawl that take into account the spatial configuration of the urban areas (not just total amount). This paper introduces four new measures of urban sprawl: degree of urban dispersion (DIS), total sprawl (TS), degree of urban permeation of the landscape (UP), and sprawl per capita (SPC). They characterize urban sprawl from a geometric point of view. The measures are related through TS = DIS Â urban area, UP = TS/size of the landscape studied, and SPC = TS/number of inhabitants.
EARTH SCIENCES AND HUMAN CONSTRUCTIONS
It is thought that the compact city is the best goal to prevent or reduce the negative effects of urbanization on the environment. Therefore, this work focuses on the use of controlled urban planning parameters and zoning parameters, during the drafting of the urban development plan in Kosovo, which in most cases are ignored. The aim of this paper is to find a way to develop compact and sustainable cities in Kosovo, and is based on quantitative research. The paper evaluates the built area within “urban zones” in order to identify the expansion tendencies of settlements, with the aim of contributing to preventing future uncontrolled developments. Additionally, land use should be in full compliance with spatial plans, both national and local. In this case, the treatment of the city of Kaçanik was taken as an example for Kosovo's conditions, based on the demographic potential, intensity of land use, style of construction, with the implementation of the zoning parameters, showing th...
An Integrated Modelling Approach to Urban Growth and Land Use/Cover Change
Land, 2022
Long-term sustainable development in developing countries requires researching and projecting urban physical growth and land use/land cover change (LUCC). This research fills a gap in the literature by exploring the issues of modelling coupled LUCC and urban growth, their causes, and the role of policymakers. Tabriz metropolitan area (TMA), located at northwest Iran, was chosen as a case study to design an integrated framework using four well-established methods: cellular automata (CA), Markov chains (MC), logistic regression (LR), and stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA). Northern, northwest , and central TMA were affected the worst by urbanisation and the loss of cultivated and grassland between 1990 and 2020. The accessibility of arterial roadways and proximity to major cities influenced these changes. Three scenarios characterise LUCC dynamics: the uncontrolled growth scenario (UGS) and the historical trend growth scenario (HTGS) foresee significant loss of cultivated land and continued urban expansion above the long-term average in 2050, while the environmental protection growth scenario (EPGS) promotes sustainable development and compact urbanisation. This study's methodology can follow and investigate the coupled dynamics of LUCC and urban growth spatially and temporally.
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019
Urban redevelopment and the improvement of urban green coverages have become an important form of urban landscape evolution and have led to a decline in imperviousness. However, in the quantitative analyses of landscape patterns, such form has not been as widely considered as urban expansion dynamics represented by the growth of impervious surfaces. Furthermore, existing metrics ignore the different patch shapes in the identification of spatial evolution types, thereby significantly affecting the recognition of spatial relationships between new and existing patches. This study proposes a shapeweighted landscape evolution index (SWLEI) for simultaneously analyzing the landscape expansion and shrinkage types of patches in two or more periods. Compared with existing landscape expansion metrics, the SWLEI can depict the spatial relationships between new and old patches from a more detailed perspective and is thus more comprehensive and meaningful in terms of geospatial recognition. Empirical analysis in Hubei Province in central China indicated that dramatic urban expansion and smallscale urban built-up land use change occurred in 1990e2015. The changed urban patches can reflect the spatial patterns and distribution of urban redevelopment, and indicate the characteristics of the spatial optimization of urban land uses and urban greening. The characteristics of urban expansion and redevelopment patterns showed a distinctive disparity in different cities and periods. Urban growth became increasingly compact after 2005, and most cities experienced redevelopment at the early stage of urbanization and after 2005. Furthermore, the newly developed and changed urban patches were clustered in the central and eastern areas with advantageous physical and economic conditions.