Sustainable development is one of the greatest challenges to urban planning in
the 21st century. Current patterns of urban development, called byspecially sprawl, and
human activity have led to environmental degradation and created a serious threat to
continued human existence and sustainability of life on earth. The United States,
concerns over consequences of urban sprawl have led to increased advocacy for more
compact and traditional urban development. The compact city is now widely accepted as
the most effective solution to sustainable urban form.
The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between sustainability
and urban form. In order to achieve the aims of this study, 50 cities in the United States
are analyzed and compared with the 2008 sustainable city rankings from the
organization SustainLane, using four categories of urban form indicators: densities,
mode of commute to work, mean travel time to work & traffic congestion cost, and
planning & land use. This research is based on the hypothesis that a sustainable city has
a compact city form. According to the SustainLane 2008 US sustainable city ranking high ranked cities were considered more sustainable cities and low ranked cities were
regarded as less sustainable cities. Using SPSS’s correlation analysis tool, I studied the
relationship between overall city ranking and four categories of urban form the
indicators. The overall finding of the analysis of the relationship between each indicator
and urban form yields mixed results.
The result of this research found that that sustainable city and urban form has
several correlations; densities, mode of commute to work, and planning and land use
have a strong positive correlation with sustainable city; however, mean travel time to
work and traffic congestion cost have a negative correlation with SustainLane’s
sustainable city ranking. These results mean that sustainable cities which were high
ranked cities in the SustainLane 2008 US sustainable city ranking have a high density,
sustainable mode of commute to work, and strong planning and land use. Particularly,
when a mixed land use, centeredness, and street connectivity were combined, the
planning and land use category of indicators shows stronger correlation with
sustainability. According to this result, these findings suggest that when the planning and
land use indicators are combined synergistically compact urban form can be an indicator
of a more sustainable city.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-12-7495 |
| Date | 2009 December 1900 |
| Creators | Kim, Bo Ah |
| Contributors | Neuman, Michael |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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