Stability tests of urban physical form indicators: The case of European cities

Due to the lack of specific tools designed for the purpose of measuring urban physical form, adopting a variety of indicators from different disciplines is necessary. In this paper, for one of these possible dimensions of form, several indicators are proposed, and using stability tests, this study will focus on identifying the most suitable indicators for estimating degrees of evenness in the spread of urban development in 30 European cities. Our tests show that, among five proposed indicators for measuring degrees of evenness, Atkinson Index (AI) with weighted parameter (β) of 0.1 is relatively the most stable indicator.