Quantifying the urban built environment: a neighbourhood-scale analysis

The quantification of the built environment has been approached from two major perspectives-regionalscale and neighbourhood-scale. Few studies have attempted to quantify the built environment from the neighbourhood-scale and none of these studies attempted to examine the interactions that exist between the respective built environment indicators and the spatial variation of such interaction which may help under the emerging travel-related prototypical neighbourhoods. Two types of datasets were used in the study and these are neighbourhood-based field surveys and data extracted from a satellite image. These were used to compute indicators which were in turn used to measure the built environment of Benin metropolitan region. The interaction between the indicators revealed that the quantification of the built environment categorised the region into 3 distinct prototypical neighbourhoods-pedestrian-oriented zones, transit-oriented zone, and car-oriented zone.