Effects Of Urban Form On Urban Energy Consumption

Urban form refers to the framework of urban land use and the spatial distribution of its elements.Different urban scale and form will lead to different impacts on urban energy consumption.Exploring the relationship between urban form and energy consumption is the cornerstone of sustainable urban form study and the theoretical basis for optimizing urban land use and spatial layout to build an energy-efficient city.Based on the implication of urban form,compactness index,fractal dimension index and shape index are adopted to measure urban form.The three indices of Chinese prefecture-level cities are calculated with the impervious surface data,following by the analysis of the temporal and spatial pattern of the urban form for these cities.The energy consumption estimation model for urban residents is then constructed based on some public data regarding to energy and transportation,and the characteristics of structure and distribution of energy consumption in China are analyzed based on the results.Finally,the geographical weighted regression model(GWR)is adopted to quantitatively identify the impact of urban agglomeration on urban energy consumption.The calculation results of urban form indices show that China's prefecture-level cities are generally compact,whose boundaries are relatively simple and shape are irregular.The cities tend to be more dispersed during developing,and the boundaries and shapes tend to be more complicated,especially the southern cities.The results of energy consumption estimation model show that China's energy consumption grows fast and the growth rate of transportation energy consumption is greater than that of household energy consumption.The energy consumption per capita of residents in the northern cities is greater than that of the southern cities.In terms of energy structure,central heating energy consumption accounts for the largest proportion of household energy consumption,and private car energy consumption accounts for the largest proportion of traffic energy consumption.The empirical results of the impact of urban form on residents' energy consumption show that the urban concentration shows a saving effect on household energy consumption,especially in the western cities and southern cites.The saving effect of urban concentration on the transportation energy consumption is not as strong as it is for household energy consumption.Urban concertation may cause traffic energy waste in the early stage,but the energy-saving effect of urban concentration will appear with the development of city.Based on the above calculations and empirical results,some measures are proposed in this paper,such as improving central heating transmit efficiency,controlling private car energy consumption,improving transportation network,and developing public transportation.