Should neighborhood effect be stable in urban geosimulation model? A case study of Tokyo

Abstract

Neighborhood effect is one of the most important components in the construction of cellular automata (CA) - based urban geosimulation models. Although some literatures have focused on the neighborhood effect in the study of land-use changes, mechanism of the effect still keeps unknown. Purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of neighborhood effect in the case study of the Tokyo metropolitan area of Japan. Neighborhood effect in urban dynamics is evaluated for the four time intervals of 1974-1979, 1979-1984, 1984-1989, and 1989-1994 of the Tokyo metropolitan area using a neighborhood interaction model. The results show that neighborhood effect is quite different for the transition of different land-use types. But for one certain land-use type, although the regressed coefficient, which can represent the neighborhood effect, has a slight difference in different time interval, the general trends of coefficient show similar. This finding indicates that neighborhood effect essentially keeps stable during certain long time period. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.