Compact city, a sustainable urban form

This paper is divided into two sections. The first section, describes sustainable urban form and its design concepts in urban area. A thematic analysis has been used to cope with vast body of sustainable development and environmental planning literature. The analysis identifies seven design concepts related to sustainable urban form: compactness, density, sustainable transport, mix use, diversity, greening, and passive solar design. Moreover, we mention four types of sustainable urban form at the end of the first section. In the second section, this article has focused on compact city as one type of sustainable urban form and describes some main characteristics of that. Finally, we explain some models of compact city with their characteristics and provide a comparative chart of the expected performance of these models based on agreed sustainability characteristics.

Keywords:

sustainable urban form , design concepts , compact city , compact city models