Incidence of the Urban Form on the Municipal Public Services’ Economic Metabolism

Abstract

One of the characteristics that best define an urban system is the existence of a series of community services allowing the city life to develop in proper conditions of safety, health, functionality, and habitability. Since those services are usually deployed through the public space, urban morphology conditions their topology and dimensions as well as their economic metabolism. Thus, the knowledge of both the nature and intensity of the relationship between the urban form and the operating cost of public services offers the possibility to deepen the analysis of those development models, which could be more sustainable from the economic point of view. For this purpose, an urban fragment operating cost function from its basic urban variables has been developed using the Effective Cost of Services Provided by Local Entities Database performed by the Spanish Ministry of Finance since 2014. This database provides information on both the operating cost of public services and some physical reference variables. The study has shown that, on average, 30% of the municipality´s current expenditures are devoted to services directly linked to urban form, being the housing density, the relative length of roads, the relative road area, and the parks and gardens ratio those urban variables showing the biggest influence on the operating cost of a city fragment.