Estimating urban sprawl standards by means of the Urban Metric System

This article emphasizes the radically original character of the Urban Metric System: use of vector fields, a single parameter, several types of urban areas, a single input (the distribution of populations and jobs), no political boundaries taken into account and no density as input, abandonment of urban-rural distinctions and of the "commuting" criterion to distinguish the central city and its metropolitan area, and estimation of the centers, boundaries and densities of urban areas as outputs. The genesis of this approach is presented here for the first time. It leads not only to the calculation of a synthetic urban sprawl criterion (average distance to the center), but also to the estimation of four functions for calculating urban sprawl standards for central Canada, which was the authors’ ultimate research objective in terms of policy and planning.