Highlights We compute a SIP metric for the largest 42 regions in the United States. We find five latent structural factors describing the level of sprawl in a region. Social contact opportunities are negatively affected by urban sprawl. Decentralization affects SIP more than Fragmentation and Commute Duration. Intensification of land use through densification and infill will increase SIP.
Abstract This paper investigates the impact of urban spatial structure on the opportunities for people to participate in face-to-face activities. We make use of the Social Interaction Potential (SIP) metric, a tool to measure the average level of opportunity for people to engage in face-to-face activities given some basic constraints on their daily mobility patterns. Generally, this opportunity is a reflection of whether the urban spatial structure – a term that broadly applies to the spatial arrangement of land-uses and the interactions between them – constrains or permits the ability for potential activity partners to be at the same place and time. In this paper, the SIP metric is applied to 42 metropolitan regions in the United States with populations over 1,000,000 people. These measurements are regressed against a set of indicators of urban sprawl to expose the relationship between spatial structure and SIP. The indicators are generated by a factor analysis of a large set of variables describing the scale, centrality and dispersion of land-uses in addition to several other structural and infrastructure-related variables. Cluster analysis is also used to organize the regions into similar groupings with respect to their structural characteristics and the level of SIP they provide. The findings indicate that social interaction potential is hampered by decentralization, fragmentation, and longer commutes in the largest metropolitan regions in the country. Interestingly, the negative effect of decentralization on SIP Efficiency is found to be nearly ten times stronger than that of fragmentation and nearly 20 times stronger than the effect of mean commuting duration.
Urban sprawl and social interaction potential: an empirical analysis of large metropolitan regions in the United States
Journal of Transport Geography ; 31 ; 267-277
2013-01-01
11 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Telecommuting and urban sprawl
Online Contents | 2009
|British Library Conference Proceedings | 2003
|Telecommuting and urban sprawl
Elsevier | 2009
|Urban sprawl and travel to work: the case of the metropolitan area of Madrid
Online Contents | 2010
|