Measurement of Urban Compactness in Neighborhood Scale

Nowadays, the concept of compact city has come to agenda in order to prevent great disadvantages of urban sprawl. Developing an applicable measurement method to put compact city model in an appropriate framework is critical in the reflection of this city model on future plan decisions. This study aims to develop a method for measuring urban compactness at the neighborhood scale based on the number of accessible urban facilities and their service areas’ overlap. The number of urban facilities in a neighborhood directly depends on population density. Each urban facility serves a certain area around it. Therefore, in a populated neighborhood, due to excess of population, more urban facilities are available. This causes their service areas to overlap. Accordingly, measurement of the areal multiplicity of these overlapping areas can be a means of understanding the compactness of a neighborhood. For this purpose, 20 neighborhoods were selected and classified according to their density and distance to the city center. Then, five basic urban facilities and appropriate walking distance to access them were chosen based on the literature. Their location in the neighborhood was determined and their service areas were drawn using the ArcGIS software (version 10.8). In addition, correlation analysis was carried out to search for a relation between density of neighborhood and the service areas of urban facilities overlap. A comparison of the results revealed that predominantly neighborhoods with high or moderate density located in the city center or its close proximity have numerically higher amounts of overlapping areas. Therefore, they can be considered more compact neighborhoods. Likewise, a significant positive correlation was revealed between overlapping of the urban facilities’ service areas’ ratio to the neighborhood area and the neighborhood’s density as result of correlation analysis. Higher population density leads to more overlapping service areas, indicating a more compact neighborhood.