Pin-pointing sustainable urban land-use structures with the aid of GIS and cluster analysis

Abstract

As part of the national and international campaign to achieve the goal of sustainable development the search for sustainable urban form is in full swing. But the relationship between urban form and sustainability is currently still hotly debated. The need for more scientific and objective knowledge leads to a whole range of research to measurement of the physical compactness of urban settlement patterns. However the term "compactness of a city" has been defined by many only qualitatively. This induces us to create a ARC/INFO-database of land use patterns and to model the physical compactness of 116 regional cities in Germany (administratively autonomous municipalities). Moreover we calculated the degree of sealing and land price of these cities. There are many examples of claims and counter-claims within compact city theory. For example, it is claimed that the compact city protects the countryside; the counter-argument is that ecologically important urban green spaces are lost. Also it is claimed that the compact city can improve the economic attractiveness of an area; but it could be argued that the compact city generates higher land prices, making housing and business premises prohibitively expensive. For these reasons we carried out the Cluster Analysis for the 116 cities with the variables degree of sealing as an ecological indicator and land price or gross value added per m2 of settlement areas as an economic indicator in order to find out the sustainable balance between ecological and economic performance potential.