Multiclass Compactness Index for Urban Areas

Abstract

Often urban compactness indexes ignore the variegated intensity of urban development in their focus on the configuration. In this article, I propose an extension to the index of moment of inertia (IMI) as a compactness measure that can account for multiple ordinal classes representing development intensity. I demonstrate this index for developed areas for each county in the contiguous United States. These counties have a range of development configurations and intensity compositions. I show that for this data set, ignoring the multiple class composition and only focusing on the configuration overestimates the urban compactness in almost all instances. I demonstrate the impact of different analytical choices on the index for this data set.

Key Words:

• compactness
• landscape metrics
• United States
• urban form

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Often metropolitan is taken to be synonymous with urban, even though it is incorrect. Metropolitan designation refers to strength of economic connections between counties in the region, whereas urban refers to density of development in the county (Isserman 2005). Significant portions of metropolitan counties are rural; that is, they do not meet the density thresholds to be classified as urban.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nikhil Kaza

NIKHIL KAZA is a Professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the measurement of urban form, energy planning, and networks.