Investigating configurational and active centralities: The example of metropolitan Copenhagen

Identifying centralities in cities helps determine how public space is perceived and utilized in everyday life. Sustainable mobility, social sustainability and spatial justice can be examined by investigating centralities in the urban form. In this study, we investigate configurational centralities in metropolitan Copenhagen created by the road network based on space syntax analysis and active centralities of land-use patterns with a geographical approach. The purpose of the research is to present a reproducible methodology for determining the active and configurational centralities. Using this methodology, we explore the meaning of the centralities in terms of pedestrian and cyclist accessibility, as well as the role of the configurational centralities in shaping land-use patterns. The results serve as input to an analysis of their relation through Kernel Density Correlation and spatial correlation. The results of correlations indicate that areas close to the city centre and around the Finger Plan – Copenhagen’s strategic development plan – tend to be more central and favourable for pedestrians and cyclists. On the contrary, central areas far from the city centre, especially in Northern Copenhagen, and areas between the axes of the Finger Plan are more car-oriented since centralities are dispersed and located around highways or road segments designed for cars. The workflow presented in this paper is provided as a set of open-source R scripts that draw largely on data from OpenStreetMap, thus enabling replications of the study for other cities.