Urban form metrics for building occupancy modelling: applications and impacts

Within urban morphology research, understanding urban spaces and their functions is crucial in several application fields including, but not limited to, city and transport planning, risk management, and urban climate. An important task is building occupancy modelling, which can be studied by using a broad selection of urban form metrics as proxy parameters. This paper describes and analyses the collection of urban form metrics used in the context of building occupancy modelling found in relevant scientific publications. Based on the scientific literature, a catalogue of 313 metrics is created, which are then categorised according to multiple characteristics and ranked by their importance. The main findings suggest that frequently used metrics in the domain do not necessarily show the most impact on modelling. Three-quarters of the metrics in the literature are mentioned only a single time, suggesting a limited data availability or highly specialised research questions.

PRACTICE RELEVANCE

This overview of urban form metrics specifically focuses on building occupancy modelling applications (e.g. building classification or population estimation). It also enables informed decisions for selecting metrics based on data availability, spatial scale and research subjects by introducing a novel importance ranking of metrics based their impact in other studies. The newly created catalogue is provided in a ready-to-use format. This is accessible to researchers and practitioners and allows them to reflect critically on which metrics to choose and thereby effectively select the appropriate urban form metric(s) for their own needs.