Landscape and Ecology I

[024] Urban form indicators to assess urban change and green spaces

Estefania Rodriguez, Youngchul Kim

キーワード：Urban form, urban form indicators, green spaces, urban change

UN Habitat (2020) projects that more than 60 % global population will live in urban areas. As population increases fast, city’s boundaries also expand. This expansion has affected environment, most of them associated with green space. To confront this issue, developing urban planning policies towards a sustainable development is required and measuring the urban form can provide where green space decreases, as it reveals the impact of urbanization on the environment within and around a city (Alberti, 2005). Since studies have demonstrated relevant indicators that quantifies the urban form, it is necessary to identify appropriate indicators to investigate impacts of changes in urban forms on environmental conditions. Thus, this paper seeks to identify urban form indicators that appropriately describes the relationship between green spaces and urban change. Urban form indicators that are applicable to many cities with considering green space were identified by analyzing relevant studies and indicators. According to the results, urban indicators that capture the compactness, centrality, complexity, porosity, continuity, and density dimensions of the urban form are more likely to be appropriate to assess this change. In addition, the reviewed indicators can be classified in two categories: morphological indicators and socio-economic indicators. The morphological indicators include subcategories of urban concentration, spatial expansion patterns, patch fragmentation, landscape complexity (Pili et al., 2017), and the socio-economic indicators include size, density, and intensification (Schwarz, 2010; Tratalos et al., 2007).