Applying urban compactness metrics on pan-european datasets

Abstract

Urban compactness is measured for a number of medium sized European cities based on metrics available in the literature. The information used is a combination of Urban Atlas and Urban Audit data sets. The former is a source of spatial data whereas the latter of population data. These datasets that have been made recently available providing for the first time the opportunity to perform comparative analysis of urban compactness across European countries. The results provide an interesting insight of variation amongst cities in different countries.