Abstract:

Since the prevailing adoption of sustainable objectives in the early 20th century, there has been increasing interest in compact city. Due to its significant advantages, compact city has been advocated by many scholars to resolve such problems as city sprawling, city decline as well as limited supply of land resources. In addition, the promotion of compact city also has enshrined in landuse planning policy in many countries; however, the lack of tools measuring compactness leads to difficulties not only in investigating the impacts of the process but also in gauging progress towards sustainability objectives. Therefore, better measures of compactness are needed for use as planning tools, as well as to enable measurement of progress toward sustainability and to assist study on the impacts of compactness. Based on the related theories and background of meaning of compact city, this paper explains the implication of compact city in the first place, which means higher economic and population density, mixed uses, higher intensity development and limited sprawling rate. A theoretical model is also established to assess the compactness of cities, which consists of the following fourdimensional parts: (1) density, which can be identified by high population density, high density of built form and public transport; (2) scale, which is mainly measured by the percentage of urban construction land and the number of private cars; (3) intensity, which can be defined as an increase in the density of population and the intensification of the builtform as well as economic agglomeration; (4) structure, which means varied and plentiful supply of facilities and services, and mix of uses within urban construction land. With this theoretical model, an index system consisted of four primary indicators, twelve secondary indicators is set up to evaluate the compactness of cities. The results show that: the overall compactness of 16 cities in the Chang jiang River Delta is low, and that the spatial disequilibrium exists obviously. Moreover, the development process of compact cities to some extent correlates with the development level of city itself, which is further proved by the test of the correlation analysis showing that the factors of industrial structure and urbanization rate are positively correlated with the compactness index of cities in the Chang jiang River Delta. Finally, the paper draws the conclusion that factors including as the dispersion of development zones, expansion of urban construction land have affected the spatial efficacy of cities in the Chang jiang River Delta. The spatial structure of the public transport, education and health service should be improved rapidly. The work outlined in this paper has made a clear contribution to the task of measuring urban compactness and thus provides support for further empirical work