Quality of urban patterns: Spatially explicit evidence for multiple scales

Many urban areas lack in quality of urban condition, thus affecting the quality of life of urban dwellers. Great efforts are made to develop new strategies for transforming existing urban patterns toward higher quality, which is related to sodo-economic, environmental, transportation, and other factors. The analysis of possible transformations further requires considering their effects at a parcel scale up to the city region. This is important, because gaining in one quality at a local scale, e.g., housing supply, comes partly at the expense of other qualities, such as the availability of open space, affecting recreation amenities at a regional scale. However, an approach for the assessment of the urban condition's quality across multiple aspects and scales is not yet available. We demonstrate an indicator-based behavioral modeling approach, which illustrates interactions and effects on and between different spatial scales. An urban development scenario was compared to the status quo to show the effects on different quality aspects. A set of indicators was calculated from the modeling results and mapped for the regional, district, and local scale. The cross-scale analysis of the selected indicators effectively points to areas where densification patterns cause, e.g., loss in their recreational quality and, thus, potentially a degradation of the quality of life of urban dwellers. The presented approach helps understanding the relationships between political interventions, urban patterns, and their impact on urban quality. The spatially explicit visualization of possible effects may support matching different spatial development policy objectives across the divergent targets of regional planning participants. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.