The City Form Lab has developed improved metrics to describe the spatial structure of metropolitan areas. The paper proposed seven fundamental metrics that describe the spatial footprint and land-use pattern of a city:
- Coverage
- Polycentricity
- Compactness
- Discontiguity
- Expandability
- Land-
Use Mix
A detailed discussion of how the metrics are specified and what they describe can be found in the
Help documentation.
Reza Amindarbari, who worked on the project and is now a PhD Candidate at the North Carolina State University has since developed an GIS toolbox that automates the specification of each of the metrics. We are releasing the toolbox in a free and open source format for all interested users under the
License of Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
Download the tools on the right, along with sample datasets. The videos below explain each of the functions step by step.