Cellular Automata Analysis of Urban Sprawl in the Northeastern Osaka from the 1960s to 1970s

上杉 昌也

doi:10.4157/grj.82.618

In recent years, models based on cellular automata (CA) have been developed to explain urban land-use changes and urban sprawl. These models are used to predict the shapes of cities and to extract factors leading to urban sprawl. The aim of CA is to explain complex phenomena based on interactions among locales. Previous case studies in the field of geography produced good results for study areas in PR China and the USA. This paper aims to verify the applicability of CA to the spatiotemporal dynamics of decades-old urban sprawl in Japan and identify its characteristics. The selected study area was the northeastern sector of the Osaka metropolitan area during the Japanese high economic-growth era of the 1960s and 1970s, when urban sprawl became the most marked. In this case study, the author used the standard CA model for simulating urban sprawl, in which the transition from rural to urban land use is determined using transition probabilities and stochastic procedures. The transition probabilities used here are composed of land-use suitability, accessibility, and zoning along with neighborhood effects, which are generally basic elements of existing CA models. Empirical data on built-up areas in the study from 1961 and 1974 were used to verify the results of simulation. For the verification, overlying empirical land-use changes and simulated results and fractal dimensions were used.<br>The results of the simulations can be summarized as follows. Although the geometric characteristics of spatial distribution are well reproduced, comparison of the simulated results and empirical data produced less coincidence than expected. Actual urban sprawl tends to overcome geomorphologic constraints, and large-scale planned residential development often occurred in detached areas including the eastern hilly area or southern Kadoma from existing built-up areas. These characteristics are due to the structure of housing site provision considered to have been distinct aspects of Japanese urbanization in the high economic-growth era. The simulation results also showed that neighborhood conditions, in which size is roughly equivalent to a city block, and zoning contributed to urban expansion, although the immediate effects of accessibility conditions cannot be confirmed. On the other hand, the simulated results of urban sprawl, which tends to occur on the periphery of the metropolitan built-up area, matched empirical phenomena. These results suggest the usefulness of the notion that macro-scale urbanization can be modeled by the accumulation of micro-scale interlocational interactions. These results explain why this region of Osaka is characterized by these urbanization processes.

Cellular Automata Analysis of Urban Sprawl in the Northeastern Osaka from the 1960s to 1970s

Bibliographic Information

Search this article

Description

Journal

Citations (2)*help

References(29)*help

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Export

Report a problem