The concept of urban intensity and China's townization policy: Cases from Zhejiang Province

Urban intensity, in this paper, is measured by four related concepts: compactness, diversity, density, and connectivity. Together they lead to a single idea when considering spatial distributions potentially in a virtuous manner with regard to resource consumption, economic opportunity, social integration and environmental performance. The methodologies applied here included Moran's I, Shannon's index entropy, and accessibility isotimelines, which were then applied to real case scenarios in 20 towns in Zhejiang Province, selected based on their economic performances, population sizes, and geographical locations. Further inspection discovered that density, an outcome of urban form, is highly correlated to compactness, leading to its elimination. The results showed that among the varying spatial arrangements of urban activities, building footprints and infrastructural elements characterized by monocentric centers of use inscribed with well-defined and relatively uniform grids of streets and related networks, alongside of relatively integrated zones of use, seemed to perform best with regard to urban intensity. At the other end of the morphological spectrum, towns with sharp separations of uses and zones of development, often resulting in overall bifurcation of a town's spatial layout, performed less well. Also, linear forms for small towns were less favorable.