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Cost-Efficient Urban Areas Minimising the Connection Costs of Buildings by Roads: Simultaneous Optimisation of Criteria for Building Interval and Built Cluster Size

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Abstract

Although methods based on bottom-up approaches to delineating urban areas have been developed by focusing on the locations of buildings and road networks, they fail to account for the relationship between the delineated urban areas and the average total management cost of the road networks connecting the buildings. Focusing on building locations, a two-step method is proposed: clustering buildings with intervals that are shorter than a criterion, rc, before delineating built clusters that are bigger than a criterion, mc, as urban areas. Although rc has been optimised in the literature, rc and mc have not simultaneously been offered as optimal solutions. This is the motivation for answering the following question: how can we simultaneously optimise rc and mc to minimise the average total management cost (per building)? The study’s main conclusions are that: (1) there is an rc and mc pair that can minimise the average total management cost and delineate optimal urban areas; and (2) in the empirical study region (Chiba prefecture), the optimal rc and mc are 48 m and 42, respectively. Such optimal urban areas are expected to provide urban planners with a norm that can be compared not only with current but also with future images of urban areas.

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Data Availability

Data will be available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.

Notes

  1. DIDs meet the following three conditions: (1) the population density in each census unit is equal to or more than 40 persons per hectare; (2) census units within administrative boundaries are adjacent to one another; and (3) the population in DIDs is equal to or more than 5,000 persons (Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Government of Japan).

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Professor Yasushi Asami, the editor and two anonymous referees for their extremely valuable comments and suggestions. This research was the result of the joint research with CSIS, the University of Tokyo (No. 785) and used the following data: Residential Maps provided by Zenrin, CO., Ltd.

Funding

This work was supported Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (20H02383).

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  1. Department of Urban Engineering, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Hiroyuki Usui

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  1. Hiroyuki Usui
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Correspondence to Hiroyuki Usui.

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Usui, H. Cost-Efficient Urban Areas Minimising the Connection Costs of Buildings by Roads: Simultaneous Optimisation of Criteria for Building Interval and Built Cluster Size. Netw Spat Econ 23, 65–96 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-022-09579-4

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