Towards a relational conception of the compact city

Abstract

Compact city strategies have become central to the development of urban sustainability politics. Cities across the globe are pursuing high-density, mixed-use developments and energy-efficient transportation systems. However, the correlation between compact city strategies and achieved sustainability is largely taken for granted in public and academic debates. Providing a spatial critique of the theory guiding compact city policy and practice, this article demonstrates how the prioritisation of urban form and territorial boundaries in measuring sustainability ultimately ignores the societal and environmental effects and foundations of current compact city approaches. Building upon this critique, I argue for a relational orientation that can attune research and practice to the compact city’s intensive and extensive constitution and consequently to its actual and potential (re)production. Analysing Oslo’s involvement in the EU network ‘Sub>Urban: Reinventing the Fringe’, and work that has followed from this network, the article develops three critical perspectives to advance compact city theorisation beyond traditional frameworks: (1) the relational topographies of the compact city; (2) the relational intensities of the compact city; and (3) the planetary constitution of the compact city. In doing so, a critical geography of how the compact city is produced – discursively and materially – is proposed.

Comparisons of three‐dimensional urban forms in different urban expansion types: 58 sample cities in China

“…The combination of different UGPs and building layout indices, such as compact-high density and spread-low density, and their correlations with urban vitality (He et al, 2018;, air quality (Stone, 2008;Xue, Wang, Peng, Wang, & Shen, 2020), urban wind tunnels (Hang & Li, 2010), and the urban heat island (Zhou & Chen, 2018) have inspired an extensive level of interest from scholars in various fields. The concept of a "compact city" originated in Western countries, and it proposes a high-density urban land use development model that causes increasingly more people to gather on the existing urban land (Artmann, Kohler, Meinel, Gan, & Loja, 2019;Kjaeras, 2020). Therefore, the compact form may give rise to tall buildings with large floor-area ratios.…”

Pembentukan Compactness Di Kawasan Kampus: Studi Kasus Kawasan Universitas Amikom Yogyakarta

“…Adapun menurut Roychansyah (2006) dalam konsep compact city terdapat 6 atribut untuk mengukurnya, yaitu usaha menaikkan kepadatan penduduk (population densification), pengkonsentrasian kegiatan (activity concentration), intensifikasi transportasi umum (public transport intensification), pertimbangan besaran dan akses kota (city scale consideration), target kesejahteraan sosial-ekonomi (social welfare justice), dan proses menuju kompak. Lee, Kurisu, An, dan Hanaki (2014) dan Kjaerås (2020) Unit analisis dari penelitian ini yaitu Kawasan Universitas AMIKOM Yogyakarta meliputi kepadatan kawasan, fungsi bangunan, transportasi yang digunakan penghuni kawasan, ukuran kawasan, dan interaksi antar penghuni kawasan. Adapun cara memperoleh data di lapangan yaitu melalui observasi, kuesioner, dan wawancara.…”

Scaling the Potential of Compact City Development: The Case of Lahore, Pakistan

“…The concept of sustainable development encompasses seven attributes in urban areas, namely compactness, sustainable transport, population density, mixed land uses, diversity, passive solar design, and greening [4,5]. Globally, the compact city is recognized as the most pertinent model to stimulate sustainable urban development [6][7][8]. There is no general 2 of 22 definition of the compact city in the previous literature, but there are many available definitions focused on the core elements of the sustainable urban form.…”