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	Urban Vitality Index	Urban Form Morphometrics
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1961	2019
Originator	Jane Jacobs (conceptual); operationalised by later urban analysts	Quantitative urban-morphology tradition; momepy toolkit by Martin Fleischmann
Type	Composite descriptive index of urban vitality	Systematic quantitative measurement of urban form across buildings, plots, blocks, and streets
Seminal source	Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House. ISBN: 9780679741954	Fleischmann, M. (2019). momepy: Urban Morphology Measuring Toolkit. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1807.
Aliases	Urban Vitality Measure, Jacobs Vitality Index, Street Vitality Index, Urban Liveliness Index	Urban Morphometrics, Quantitative Urban Morphology, Morphometric Analysis of Urban Form, Built-Form Morphometrics
Related	4	4
Summary	The urban vitality index is a composite descriptive measure of how lively, busy and economically active an urban area is, built from the conditions Jane Jacobs argued generate street life. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs identified four generators of diversity — mixed primary uses, short blocks, a mix of building ages, and sufficient density — together producing the foot traffic and 'eyes on the street' that make places vital. The index operationalises these qualities as measurable indicators for each spatial unit, normalises them onto a common scale, and combines them into a single vitality score that can be mapped, compared and tracked over time.	Urban form morphometrics is the systematic, quantitative measurement of the physical form of cities — the dimensions, shapes, spatial arrangement, intensity, and connectivity of buildings, plots, blocks, and streets. Rather than describing morphology in words, it computes hundreds of reproducible numerical characters on each morphological element and its local context, turning the qualitative tradition of urban morphology into a measurable science. The open-source momepy toolkit, introduced by Martin Fleischmann in 2019, standardized this workflow, building a morphological tessellation from building footprints and computing dimension, shape, distribution, intensity, and connectivity characters at scale.