Are We in Boswash Yet? A Multi-Source Geodata Approach to Spatially Delimit Urban Corridors

Abstract

Abstract:The delimitation of urban space is conceptually elusive and fuzzy. Commonly, urban areas are delimited through administrative boundaries. These artificial, fixed boundaries, however, do not necessarily represent the actual built-up extent, the urban catchment, or the economic linkage within and across neighboring metropolitan regions. For an approach to spatially delimit an urban corridor-a generically defined concept of a massive urban area-we use the Boston to Washington (Boswash) region as an example. This area has been consistently conceptualized in literature as bounded urban space. We develop a method to spatially delimit the urban corridor using multi-source geodata (built-up extent, infrastructure and socioeconomic data) which are based on a grid rather than on administrative units. Threshold approaches for the input data serve to construct Boswash as varying connected territorial spaces, allowing us to investigate the variability of possible spatial forms of the area, i.e., to overcome the simple dichotomous classification in favor of a probability-based differentiation. Our transparent multi-layer approach, validated through income data, can easily be modified by using different input datasets while maintaining the underlying idea that the likelihood of an area being part of an urban corridor is flexible, i.e., in our case a factor of how many input layers return positive results.

Impact assessment of Corridor Oriented development

“…Urban sprawl can be classified into three significant categories: Lowdensity sprawl, Ribbon development and Leapfrog sprawl (Harvey & Clark, 1971;Taubenbock et al, 2009a). On the contrary, modern concepts of urban expansion, for example, Functional urban region, Megacity, Megalopolis, Megapolitan, Megaregion and Urban corridors (Catalan et al, 2008;Fang & Yu, 2017;Georg et al, 2018;Piacentini & Rosina, 2012) have common traits of extended limits of city growth beyond its administrative boundaries forming gigantic regions around the core city. By definition, an urban corridor is developed with several polycentric city clusters linked with transport routes (Georg et al, 2016b;Li and Cao, 2005).…”

What Is Urban after All? A Critical Review of Measuring and Mapping Urban Typologies in Portugal

“…However, many reports highlight the difficulties in establishing an approach adjusted to the heterogeneity of the definition in different countries [20][21][22][23] and in the selection of determinant indicators [24]. Classification by administrative boundaries is widely adopted by census agencies and used for comparison purposes, but its inadequacy has been widely criticised from several perspectives for its ephemeral character (boundaries can change by decree overnight) [24]; for not being restricted to urban occupation (it may include vast rural areas) [25][26][27]; and, related to this last issue, for affecting data collection [28] and analysis (when assuming census tracks as the smallest homogeneous area) [7]. In this respect, the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), first studied by Gehlke and Biehl [29], and later by Openshaw [30], addresses the discussion of this paper concerning the translation of the urban concept applied to administrative boundaries to the reality of the territory.…”

“…Spatial approaches as opposed to administrative units have been used mainly from satellite and other aerial imagery (e.g., land cover datasets, night time lights) [27,[31][32][33]. The operationalisation of the concept of urban form through the implementation of a methodology used to delimit urban areas adjusted to Mainland Portugal, based on a European technical procedure for delimiting Urban Morphological Zones from the reclassification of the Corine Land Cover nomenclature, is an example of extending the pertinence of this approach to urban planning [34].…”

A Novel Approach for Identifying Urban Built-Up Area Boundaries Using High-Resolution Remote-Sensing Data Based on the Scale Effect

“…From the perspective of the data sources, current studies related to urban built-up area delimitation have mostly been based on demographical statistics [13][14][15][16], POI (point-of-interest) data [1], land cover classification [17][18][19][20] such as the Global Urban Footprint [21,22], and nighttime light [23][24][25]. From the perspective of data processing, methods of identifying urban built-up area can be grouped into two categories.…”

“…Jamal Abed et al (2003) established a composite index compounding urban building concentration intensity, land-use abundance, economic activity intensity, and urbanization intensity together with remote-sensing imagery and GIS data, and identified the fuzzy urban built-up area boundaries based on the threshold of this composite index [19]. Georg et al (2018) delimited the Boswash urban corridor using multi-source geodata (built-up extent, infrastructure and socioeconomic data) and set individual thresholds for each input layers based on the connectivity of the Boswash area [21]. The disadvantage of using threshold indictor to obtain urban built-up area boundaries arises from the fact that the threshold relies on the empirical knowledge of the researcher and the method cannot guarantee the continuity of the resultant urban built-up area boundary.…”