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Development of Urban Sustainability Index Using 3-D Spatial Metrics Sara Shirowzhan1 and Samsung Lim2

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PhD Candidate, School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia, PH +61 47909 5314; email: s.shirowzhan@student.unsw.edu.au Associated Professor, School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia; email: s.lim@unsw.edu.au

ABSTRACT Advanced spatial technologies such as photogrammetry and lidar have improved the quality of spatial information and enable data processing for more accurate estimation of urban environment parameters. This study aims to develop a quantification method for urban sustainability indexes by using spatial metrics such as compactness, complexity and density. Although building height information is an important element of urban morphology, it has been neglected in previous studies. Hence, height information obtained by lidar is incorporated into the spatial metrics in this study. The spatial metrics are applied to four study cases. We have examined the metrics and concluded that the developed metrics can quantify the sustainable urban form concept more effectively. The main finding of this study confirms that the 3-dimensional spatial metrics differentiate the complexity of urban areas significantly. Another significance of this study is the high capability of spatial metrics for the quantification of sustainable urban forms in terms of complexity, compactness and density. The developed indexes can be used for the determination of the spatio-temporal changes of sustainable urban forms or the comparison of the cities in terms of a sustainable urban form using remotely sensed data. Keywords: Urban form; Sustainability; Spatial metrics; Built environment 1. Introduction The increasing growth of human settlement has resulted in the complexity of an urban fabric. Spatial metrics have been used for the illustration, management and quantification of the characteristics of landscape and land use. For example, Frohn and Hao (2006) reported the use of landscape pattern metrics for the quantification of landscape structure/form on a map or remotely sensed imagery. Spatial metrics have the potential of an improved quantification of urban form characteristics. The use of spatial metrics has been the increasing trend of built

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environment studies (Murayama and Thapa, (2011). However, the current spatial metrics can not characterize the morphology of an urban form in a three dimensional manner. Recently, remote sensing technologies (e.g. photogrammetry and lidar) provide dense elevation information of urban forms. That is, high-resolution stereographic aerial photos and lidar data can be used to estimate building elevation. These highresolution data acquisition technologies provide the potential of enhanced spatial metrics to the third dimension. Lidar data and high-resolution images can be utilized to define and examine novel 3-D urban form metrics. However, existing urban studies that examine the similarities and differences in terms of a sustainable development show that there are no universally accepted variables, which are backed by theory as well as rigorous data collection and analysis (Parris and Kates, 2003). The current technologies of satellite and aerial data acquisition with more recent data processing methods have been contributing to the most adequate measurement procedures. However, the studies using lidar data in urban areas further focus on building density (Yu et al., 2010), building height (Cheng et al., 2011) and pattern of height (Zhang et al., 2011, Alobeid A, 2009 ). That is, only few studies have been conducted using lidar for the improvement of spatial metrics. A recently developed theory of sustainable urban forms that suggests four types of urban forms (Jabareen, 2006) has an arguable issue of descriptive methods for the determination of the urban sustainability. The theory classifies the sustainability concept to low, medium and high. This type of classification can be confusing especially when fuzziness of the classes is evident. Thus the major challenge in the sustainability concept has been identified as the transformation of the verbal indicators of the sustainability into quantifiable measures (Zhang and Guidon, 2006). Compactness and density are critical typologies for the sustainable urban forms (Jabareen, 2006). Our study aims to overcome the problem with the quantification of the physical aspect of sustainable urban forms, including compactness, complexity and density that constitute the sustainability indexes using spatial metrics. The main argument is that the current qualitative methods for the definition of urban forms are very limited in order to assist the planners for the recognition of the degree of the urban sustainability. In contrast, the quantitative methods can be more efficiently used for the recognition of the pattern of sustainable urban forms. The improved spatial metrics will be examined on the study area of University of New South Wales (Figures 1 and 2). For this objective, a robust quantitative method will be presented by improving the current spatial metrics in a 3dimensional manner. In doing so, the theory of sustainable urban forms and the investigation of compactness or sprawl will improve the empirical study. This means that it will be possible to assign a degree of the sustainability to a given city and also the comparison between cities in terms of the sustainability will be possible.

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Figure 1. Lidar of UNSW Campus

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Figure 2. Aerial image from UNSW

2. Methodology Firstly, a model of Sustainable Urban Form Indexes (SUFI) has been presented in the following section in order to achieve the quantification of the sustainable urban forms. The model will clarify the direction of the study. Secondly, spatial metrics of compactness, complexity and density have been developed. The unit of the measurements is building as the unit of building block has previously been used by Yoshida and Omae (2005) for the urban morphology analysis. The lidar data has been used for the extraction of footprints and elevation information. The extracted footprints have been categorized into four study cases, where the shape of first case is simple (Case 1) and the second is complex (Case 2). The other two cases are clusters of buildings with respective boundaries as their land lots. Case 3 includes buildings and boundaries smaller than Case 4. The concept of sustainable urban forms has been examined over Cases 1 to 4 (Figures 3-6). After the analysis of the results, the elevation information is used to develop the metrics to 3-D sustainable urban form indexes.

Figure 3; Case 1. Footprint of the simple building

Figure 4; Case 2. Footprint of the complex building

Figure 5; Case 3. Footprints of the smaller urban area

Figure 6; Case 4. Footprints of the larger urban area

3. Modelling Measurement of Urban Form Sustainability The relationship between urban morphology and sustainability of urban forms has been confirmed by several studies (Smith and Levermore, 2008); Banister et al.,

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1997). The sustainable urban form concepts characterizing physical urban form are density, complexity and compactness (Figure 7). Spatial metrics could measure the physical aspect of sustainable urban forms. Figure 7 illustrates the model of sustainable urban form Indexes (SUFI).

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Figure 7. A model of Sustainable Urban Form Index (SUFI).

4. Development of Spatial Metrics 4.1 Spatial Metrics and Sustainable Urban Form Quantification Density: The first indicator for the definition of urban forms is density, which has been defined as the number of buildings per square kilometer. A similar metric for the patch density has been defined as the number of patches per 100 hectares (Herold M, 2002). The area unit in this study is changed to a square meter due to the size of the study area being much smaller than that of the data in the research carried out by previous researchers e.g. Herold (2002). Complexity: The shape of a building influences the level of energy required for the provision of the thermal comfort. Therefore a more complex shape of buildings has been found to result in higher energy consumption than that of a simpler building (Watson, (1992). The complexity of land cover and land use has been characterized by the spatial metrics of Area Weighted Mean Shape Index (AWMSI) and Fractal Dimension (AWMPFD) (Frohn and Hao, 2006, Herold et al., 2005). Herold et al. (2005) used IKONOS data to characterise and describe the land cover heterogeneity of urban areas with spatial metrics and classify the buildings based on the complexity and compactness of the small versus large buildings. This study does not use the spatial metrics for the determination of the heterogenity of the urban areas but uses the metrics for the determination of the complexity of individual buildings. Once the capability of these metrics for the demonstration of the level of complexity for the individual buildings is confirmed, the complexity metric will be applied to urban areas. As for the complexity metric, a correction to the equations of AWMSI and AWMPFD has been carried out as the building unit is changed. From this point, the replaced equation with the new building unit will be called as Area Weighted Mean Building Shape Index (AWMBS; Equation 1) and Area Weighted Mean Building Fractal Dimension (AWMBFD; Equation 3; Table 1). ] FDB = (1) (2)

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(3) where A represents the Area of the building lot, p is the perimeter of the footprint and a illustrates the area of the footprint. Compactness Index: The third index of the SUFI model is compactness. Compactness has been defined against sprawl in the sustainable urban form literature. The equation of this indicator has been presented as follows (Huang et al., 2007): (4) where in Equations 1 to 4, ai and pi are the area and perimeter of building i, respectively. Pi is also the perimeter of a circle with the area of ai and N is the total number of buildings (Huang et al., 2007). 4.2 Definition of 3-D Spatial Metrics In this section, three main indexes of the SUFI model are calculated by incorporating the elevation information using the 3D perimeter of the buildings. Complexity: the 3D perimeter of the buildings is calculated automatically by using a commercial lidar data processing software. Equation 5 is used for the determination of the 3-D index of complexity: ] (5)

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Compactness: Likewise the calculation of the 3-D perimeter of the buildings, the 3-D index of compactness is calculated as follows: (6) where Ep represents the 3-D perimeter of the building i.

Analysis 5.1. Before Addition of Elevation Information

This study has examined two types of building shapes; simple (Figure 3) and complex (Figure 4), as to evaluate the two equations: AWMBS and AWMBFD. For the complexity index of AWMBS, the results were as same as expected i.e. high values for more complex buildings. However, the result for AWMBFD (Equation 3) is not adequate as it shows a higher value for the simpler footprint. Therefore, Equation 3 was ignored for the rest of this study. Both AWMBS and FDB have been calculated for two buildings. The resulting figures calculated from AWMBS and FDB are demonstrated in Table 1. It is clear that these two complexity measurements are higher for Case 2 and it verifies that Case 2 is more complex (Table 1).

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After the verification of Equation 1 for the individual buildings, this equation was examined for two different sizes of urban areas; Case 3 with 219245 square meters and Case 4 with 292004 square meters (Figures 5 and 6). One of the issues raised during the data processing which can be seen in Figure 8 is that, with the current complexity measures, the complexity of the urban area of Case 3 will be demonstrated lower than Cases 1 and 2. The same problem occurred for Case 4 with a similar value (Table 1; Figure 8). To overcome this problem, 3-D indexes are proposed in order to differentiate the complexity of indivitual and grouped buildings. Table 1. Results of Sustainable Urban Form Indexes
Building footprint ID Case 1 (simple building) Case 2 (complex building) Case 3 (18 buildings) Case 4 ( 41 buildings) FDB 1.4018 1.5197 -------------Density 82 62 Compactness -------------------0.0072 0.0040 Complexity AWMBS 0.6709 0.8611 0.2272 0.7733

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5.2. After Addition of Elevation Information: 3-D indexes The results for the complexity index differentiate the complexity of individual buildings largely from the groups of buildings in Cases 3 and 4 (Table 2; Figure 7). It probably occurs due to the incorporation of elevation to Equation 5 (Figure 8). Table 2. 3-D SUF results
Data sample count Case1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4 St.dev of elevation Elevation:14.22 Elevation:26.51 12.45 14.63 12.22 Mean of elevation 3D perimeter 336.16 1407.06 5000.41 19392.50 3D Compactness ------------0.0076 0.0050 3D Complexity (AWMBS) 0.94 1.58 4.43 16.18

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Figure 7. Complexity index versus 3-D complexity index. Figure 8. Incorporating elevation information using 3-D perimeter.

The compactness index was only applied to Cases 3 and 4. The two indexes of compactness and 3-D compactness have the same behavior before and after addition of elevation (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Compactness index versus 3-D compactness index

6. Concluding Remarks This study investigated spatial metrics to quantify the physical aspect of the sustainable urban forms. The study found that it is possible to improve the spatial metrics and quantify sustainable urban forms to a third dimension. The main finding of the study is that 3-D indexes of the proposed sustainable urban form model including elevation information can explain the degree of the sustainability more clearly.

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