Compact City: Livable or Not

Abstract

The problems of urban sprawl have long been recognized. The classic response to sprawl has been compact settlements of one form or another. The concept of livability is simple as it assesses which locations around the world provide the best or the worst living conditions. This paradox remains unresolved despite recent compact city, smart growth, healthy community, and new urbanism efforts. Considerable research has been carried out to establish several relationship of livability & Sustainability .Also ,several research has been carried out to understand the factors & mechanism of compactness over the years. In general, the researches focus only on the individual characteristics &features of livability , sustainability & compactness . But very few studies have focused on the relationship of livability & compactness & their linkage. The main purpose of the study is to measure the relationship of compactness & livability based on geometrical & statistical analysis. For the study,70 cities were selected based on Mercer & the Economist’s livability ranking. The compactness of the selected cities were calculated based on Visual, Roeck,Schwartzberg, Length-Width & Perimeter test based on geometrical shape of the cities . Then the statistical analysis of the livability & Compactness ranking was executed to measure their relationship. The results show that compactness vary from city to city. Also compactness has a weak relationship with livability. Increasing the number of cities & considering more factors, would play an important role to improve the relationship of compactness & livability.