Developing Multiple Measures of Urban Patterns

Abstract

Four measures of urban patterns are identified to describe the distributions of housing units in 59 large urban areas in the United States from 1950 to 2010. These measures include density; variation in density using the index of dissimilarity; centralization measuring the proportional reduction in distance to the center; and clustering using Moran’s I, a measure of spatial autocorrelation. An empirical assessment of the suitability of these measures was undertaken. All showed sufficient variation throughout the period. The measures were significantly correlated with one another, which was expected, but each retained significant uncorrelated variation as well. Principal components analysis showed that most of the variation in these measures could be captured in 3 independent factors, which were density, a mixture of variation and centralization, and clustering with some relationship to centralization.