Abstract
Within the broad field of walkability research, a key area of focus has been the relationship between urban form and capacities for walking. Measures of walkable access can be grouped into two key types: permeability measures that quantify the ease of movement through an urban fabric, and catchment measures, quantifying the potential to reach destinations within walking distance. Of numerous street network measures in use, it has been shown that many are poor proxies of permeability and catchment. Instead, two new measures have been proposed: the area-weighted average perimeter (AwaP) and interface catchment (IC), that, combined, better capture the capacities of urban morphologies to enable and attract pedestrian movement. In this paper, we present the QGIS tool AwaP-IC, developed to overcome the difficulty of computing these measures. Unlike GIS tools based on models that abstract streets to axial lines, by employing new algorithms and spatial computation techniques, AwaP-IC analyses actual urban morphologies, based on cadastral maps delineating public and private land. This can empower a new stream of urban morphological studies with the computational power of GIS. As an open-source tool, it can be further developed for use in urban mapping and to streamline the analysis of large datasets.
Highlights
Walkability has emerged over the last decades as a key topic in health, transport and urban research.Numerous walkability indexes have been developed for research and practice, incorporating various measures of density, functional mix and access networks [1,2,3,4]
Seeking to overcome these limitations in urban morphological research, this paper presents the development of the GIS tool “area-weighted average perimeter (AwaP)-interface catchment (IC)” for measuring two key morphological properties of the urban fabric related to walkable access
The GIS tool AwaP-IC presented here measures two key properties of urban morphologies to walkable access: the capacity to walk through the urban fabric (AwaP) and the capacity to walk to related to walkable access: the capacity to walk through the urban fabric (AwaP) and the capacity to various attractions located at the public/private interface (IC)
Summary
Walkability has emerged over the last decades as a key topic in health, transport and urban research. This corresponds with the distinction made in transport studies between resistance against and attraction of movement [16] While various such measures have been in use, including average block area, block diagonal, intersection density and pedsheds, it has been shown that many of these are poor proxies for permeability and catchment, the capacities to walk through and to the urban fabric [17]. Morphological studies, on the other hand, have largely remained reliant on hand-drawn maps, or graphic software enabled tracing of urban form [10,11,12,23] Seeking to overcome these limitations in urban morphological research, this paper presents the development of the GIS tool “AwaP-IC” for measuring two key morphological properties of the urban fabric related to walkable access. We will discuss the broader implications for walkability and morphological research, and highlight potentials for further development and use
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