Good news. My paper with Monasterio, Nadalin and Albuquerque on Urban Centrality has been accepted for publication in Geographical Analysis !
Quantifying urban centrality: a simple index proposal and international comparison.
Abstract: This study introduces a new measure of urban centrality. The proposed urban centrality index (UCI) constitutes an extension to the spatial separation index (Midelfart-Knarvik et al., 2000). Urban structure should be more accurately analyzed when considering a centrality scale (varying from extreme monocentricity to extreme polycentricity) rather than being considered as a binary variable (monocentric or polycentric). The proposed index controls for differences in size and shape of the geographic areas for which data are available, and can be calculated using different variables such as employment and population densities or trip generation rates. The properties of the index are illustrated with simulated artificial datasets and compared to other similar measures proposed in the previous literature. Then the index is applied to the urban structure of four different metropolitan areas: Pittsburgh and Los Angeles in the United States; São Paulo, Brazil; and, Paris, France. The index is compared to other traditional spatial agglomeration measures, such as global and local Moran’s I, and density gradient estimations.
