Compactness for Regionalization and its Application in Land-Use Planning

Abstract

One of the most important and appealing subjects discussed and applied in manygeographical studies is compactness. This is a geometrical notion and has applications farbeyond the scope of its definition. Besides the importance of measuring compactness in asingle object, its study is significant in real-world applications, where the integration ofitems or objects in conjunction with each other is considered. Regionalization is the termcommonly used for this integrative perspective. Although there are several methods toquantify compactness, this study tries to illustrate the simple way for its calculation. Hence,this study is devised to apply with some modifications one of the methods that has beensuggested for calculating single object compactness in regionalization domain. We attemptto propose a clear definition and to evaluate the computer implementation of thecompactness in a land-use planning study. The ant colony algorithm as a heuristic approachwas applied to measure compactness in an innovative manner and to incorporate thisconcept into a land-use planning case. Results show that this method can be useful inachieving compactness in land-use planning.

Keywords

• compactness
• regionalization
• land-use planning
• ant colony