Chapter 1

Geospatial Analysis and Modeling of Urban Structure and Dynamics: An Overview

Bin Jiang and Xiaobai Yao

1.1 GIS = GISystems, GIScience, GIServices and GIStudies

Geographic information research and technologies have experienced over four decades of development, from the mainframe to the workstation to the desktop, and to todays laptop and mobile devices. Every important GIS development is driven by a significant breakthrough of mainstream information technology. For example, the 1980s was characterized by the popularity of personal computers that were increasingly becoming affordable to university departments, governmental agencies and private sectors. Many university GIS programs were established during that time period, and the NSF-funded NCGIA played an important role in coordinating the development of course curriculum and related research activities. The next decade can be named the age of GIScience. GIScience is the science behind GISystens, dealing with fundamental questions raised by the use of GISystems and technologies (Goodchild 1997). It occurred at the time when the Internet and the World Wide Web started to change the way we led our lives and ran our businesses. It was the Internet and the Web that made the GIS community think of a service oriented approach to GIS, namely GIServices (Gunther and Muller 1999). Instead of owning a GIS, end users can be served by GIS functionalities from a remote GIService center. GIServices aim to develop distributed or decentralized GIS to serve individuals and communities for spatial planning and decision making, as well as for their daily life. Another perspective of GIS is GIStudies for studying the impacts of geographic information and technologies on society. The above GIS related terms reflect from a multi-dimensional perspective how GIS has evolved from a computer-based centralized system, to an internetor-web-based decentralized service; from the technologically dominated view to the increasingly science oriented view, and to a broader societal perspective.
B. Jiang (*) Division of Geomatics, Department of Technology and Built Environment, KTH Research School, University of Gavle, SE-801 76 Gavle, Sweden e-mail: bin.jiang@hig.se

B. Jiang, X. Yao (eds.), Geospatial Analysis and Modelling of Urban Structure and Dynamics, GeoJournal Library 99, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8572-6_1, Springer ScienceBusiness Media B.V. 2010

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Along the technological dimension, GIS has evolved from initial 2D maps to 3D representations, from static maps to animated visualization, from stationary computers to mobile devices, and from being professionally oriented to catering to the general public. The continuous evolution of GIS is still ongoing. A significant driver is the search engine giant Google. The launch of Google Maps and Google Earth suddenly changed the general publics perception of GIS professionals. For example, nowadays it is much easier to explain what GIS is by simply referring to Google Maps. Indeed, Google Maps and similar online GIServices have democratized GIS and map making activities (Butler 2006) in an unprecedented manner. Hundreds of thousands of Google Maps mashups have been created to serve various professionals as well as the general public. All these are created under the rubric of Web 2.0, where individuals can voluntarily generate web content, which can be then again be shared by individuals. That said, no matter how GIS has been evolving, the core of GIS remains unchanged. As commented by the president of the leading GIS vendor ESRI, Dangermond (2003), . . . the real heart of GIS is the analytical part, where you actually explore at the scientific level the spatial relationships, patterns, and processes of geographic phenomena, cultural phenomena, biological phenomena and physical phenomena. . . . this is the area that holds the greatest promise for creating insights into how our world works and how it is evolving, connecting and changes. The ever increasingly urbanized world has created various problems of environment, climate, consumption of resources, and public health, which are closely linked to the side-effects of urbanization such as sprawl, congestion, housing affordability and loss of open space. These problems need to be addressed at various levels of spatial planning and decision making. For instance, in urbanization management, special and specific consideration should be given to the relationships between land use, transportation, and the environment. Fundamental to the urban problems are two separate yet related issues: urban structure and urban dynamics. Both issues can be seen from physical and socio-economic perspectives. From the physical perspective, urban structure has its overall geometric shape, and the shape evolves and changes over the time. On the other hand, from the socio-economic perspective, urban systems demonstrate certain structures and dynamics. Thomas Schellings well known segregation model illustrates the underlying mechanism of human movement from a social and ethical sense. More importantly, many of the components of urban structure and dynamics can be understood from an interweaving perspective involving both physical and socio-economic factors. For instance, human activities and mobility are intimately influenced by the spatial configuration of urban land use and transportation networks. Geospatial analysis and modeling, combined with the powerful capability of GIS in data storage and visualization, have become important and indispensable tools for understanding urban structure and dynamics. Primarily, the geospatial tools contribute to obtaining useful information and knowledge from massive geographic information.

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1.2 Individual-Based Data Capture for Modeling Urban Structure and Dynamics
Current GIS technologies have collected massive data for cities, and these data have been served to the public. Commonly cited examples are the above mentioned Google Maps and Google Earth that have integrated terabytes of satellite imagery, aerial photos, and GIS data. Many value-added services have been developed on platforms enabled by geographic information technologies. With the advancement of computer technologies, finer resolution geospatial data and individually-based geospatial data have become available for modeling urban structure and dynamics. Itzhak Omer in Chapter 2 presented one such case at the individual household level for examining residential segregation. Information communication technologies are providing unprecedented ways of mobile data collection (Giannotti and Pedreschi 2008). Nowadays, many urban residents carry mobile devices with built-in Bluetooth. It has been observed that about 7% of the mobile devices are set on, which provides a way to collect data about peoples whereabouts. In this regard, Chapter 3 by Vissilis Kostakos developed a novel method for collecting traffic data in urban space, and provides a novel use of space syntax (Hillier and Hanson 1984) for the design and development of pervasive systems. Interestingly, the author developed a method of tracking peoples whereabouts in virtual space (Kostakos and ONeill 2008), providing an excellent example of studying human activities in both physical and virtual space. A big problem emerging from Bluetooth detection is the invasion of privacy. In this regard, Chapter 4 contributed by Patrick Laube and his colleagues proposed the concept of decentralized spatial computing, which is able to safeguard privacy in the context of location based services. They developed some decentralized query algorithms for this purpose. In terms of data capture, it is worthwhile to mention volunteered geographic information created, assembled, and disseminated voluntarily by individuals (Goodchild 2007; Sui 2008). For example, OpenStreetMap (OSM), started in July 2004 by Steve Coast in London, is a wiki-like collaboration to create a free editable map of the world, using data from portable GPS devices, aerial photography and other free sources. Many value-added services like routing have been developed using OSM, and it provides a rich data source for studying urban structure and dynamics.

1.3 Modeling Urban Complexity and Hierarchy

Cities are complex systems that demonstrate a hierarchical structure. This is evident in Kevin Lynchs classic work the image of the city (Lynch 1960). People capture those dominant city elements in mental representations, while a majority of city elements were filtered out in the process of perception and

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cognition. Not only city elements within a city, but also cities within a country or region are hierarchically organized. This has been well exemplified in city size ranking in the classic work by Zipf (1949). This topic has received a revival of interest in recent years (Pumain 2006) in research on complexity networks followed by the major discovery of small world and scale free networks (Watts and Strogatz 1998, Barabasi and Albert 1999). Underlying the major discovery is network thinking, in which relationship between things is modeled from a topological perspective. This kind of topological perspective also underlies the phenomenal success of the Google search engine. Using crawling, the search engine captures the topological structure by modeling individual pages as nodes and hotlinks as links of a huge web graph, the worlds largest graph. This kind of network thinking has been adopted to characterize the structure of urban street networks, which are considered to be self-organized in nature (Jiang et al. 2008). It has been found that a majority of streets are trivial, while a minority of streets are vital, and the minority of streets account for a majority of traffic (Jiang 2007, Jiang 2009). In essence, cities are much like biological entities, although they are man made. Along the line of urban complexity and hierarchy, many efforts have been made using an interdisciplinary approach (e.g., Salingaros 2005, Albeverio et al. 2008). Under the same paradigm of network thinking, yet using agent based simulation modeling (Benenson and Torrens 2004, Batty 2005), Efrat BlumenfeldLieberthal and Juval Portugali in Chapter 5 developed an urban simulation model to study urban dynamics. The agents in the model are able to think globally and act locally, and eventually the local interactions of agents give rise to the global urban structure that in turn affects agents behavior. The model succeeds in generating some interesting distributions like power law distribution of city size as observed in real city systems. Hierarchy is closely related to the spatial recursive subdivision and network structure, so mathematical formalization underlying urban hierarchy is of value to better understand urban systems. Chapter 6 by Yanguang Chen studied the hierarchy of cities that has a cascade structure. This structure can be described by a set of exponential laws. A significant finding of this study is that the hierarchy of cities in the large or middle scale complies with the 2n rule, while the hierarchy at a small scale follows the 3n rule. However, both the 2n rule and 3n rule are equivalent to the rank-size rule with exponent -1.

1.4 Simulating and Modeling Urban Transportation Systems

Urban transportation systems constitute the fundamental and critical part of urban structure and dynamics. Many urban problems, such as traffic congestion, energy consumption and environmental pollution, safety, and even security and emergencies, are largely related to the transportation systems. With the increasing population burden, we are facing an unprecedented challenge to

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renew or update our transportation systems in order to accommodate more mobility. An urban transportation system is too complex to be experimented on. On the other hand, the state-of-the-art computers are powerful enough to build up a mirror world to carry out simulations, by adding different what-if scenarios and testing their feasibility. This simulation technology is commonly known as agent-based modeling or simulation. Many agents interact and communicate with each other locally, and the interaction results in some interesting and surprising structure or patterns, namely emergence. In recognizing the shortcomings of existing models of parking search, Chapter 7 by Karel Martens, Itzhak Benenson and Nadav Levy developed a non-spatial model of parking search and an agent-based model, namely PARKAGENT, for exploring parking behavior and dynamics. The authors used the two models to analyze the phenomena of searching for parking, and compared their results with a focus on the spatial effects on parking dynamics. They demonstrate some interesting outcomes that are of value for traffic engineering and for parking policies. Walid Chaker, Bernard Moulin and Marius Theriault in Chapter 8 introduced a multi-scale and multi-modal virtual urban environment that is combined with a synthetic population creation mechanism. It is able to generate various kinds of agents (e.g. pedestrians or vehicles) within a multiscale and multi-mode transport network. Such a software platform can generate a massive amount of agents and is able to simulate massive trips within one minute. It makes an important step toward more comprehensive simulation and modeling of complex urban phenomena. How urban streets are perceived by human beings and how human beings perceive the convenience of urban transportation systems constitute two basic questions of the next two papers. Itzhak Omer and Bin Jiang investigated city legibility and imageablity from the perspective of urban streets. They adopted a topological measure developed from Q-analysis (Atkin 1974) to characterize predominance of streets, and compared it with graphtheoretic measures. It provides an alternative yet complementary perspective toward the understanding of urban street networks. In Chapter 10 by Yongmei Lu, Weihong Yin and Jing Chen, transportation convenience of an urban transportation system is assessed from both subjective and objective perspectives. On the one hand, they examined how local residents perceive the transportation convenience subjectively. On the other hand, the transportation convenience is measured objectively from road capacity, public transit services and real traffic flow. Furthermore, they compare the subjective and objective assessment, and reveal some displacement between the patterns of transportation convenience. Such a study sheds substantial light on effective management and planning of urban transportations. Deelesh Mandloi and Jean-Claude Thill in Chapter 11 presented an object-oriented data model of multi-modal, and indoor/outdoor transportation networks, which is targeted for route planning and navigation as well as for other network analyses. This model integrates transportation both inside buildings (3D in nature yet using a 2.5D approach) and outside buildings (multimodes in nature involving streets, sidewalks and public transit routes).

B. Jiang and X. Yao

1.5 Analyzing and Modeling Urban Growth, Urban Changes and Impacts
For the first time in history, more than half of the worlds population lives in urban areas. Remarkably, up to 80% of the populations are urban residents in North and Latin America as well as in Europe. This situation gives rise to an increasing need to research urban growth and its impacts on various aspects of urban structure and dynamics. Remote sensing (RS) imagery has been a major data source for analyzing urban growth and land use changes, for it continuously provides time series of imagery for tracking urban expansion and land use changes. Interestingly, the integration of GIS, RS, and dynamic models has been an essential part of geospatial analysis and modeling for exploration, simulation, prediction, and model verification. Chapter 12 by Xiaojun Yang reported a study in this direction. Based on a case study of Atlanta, the study illustrates that urban growth and land use change are highly correlated with population and economic growth, as well as accessibility conditions. In contrast to the previous work, Dongmei Chen and her colleagues in Chapter 13 took the Greater Toronto Area as a case study, and investigated the relationship between landscape change and population increase, as well as the ecological impacts of urbanization. They show that landscape change is negatively correlated with population growth. Not only ecology, but also precipitation of urban area can be affected by urbanization. Marshall Shepherd and his coauthors (Chapter 14) presented a comprehensive review of studies on the urban rainfall effect: their findings and methods focused on numerical modeling. A series of recommendations is offered to improve the modeling of the urban rainfall effect, and future research advances are indicated. Chapter 15 by Dalia Varanka presented a spatial model for assessing population pressure by interpolating a consumption variable using the Kriging method. Eventually, a surface trend is generated as a visualization tool that is useful to better understand urban structure and dynamics. Xiaobai Yao in Chapter 16 investigated the concept of place and specifically focused on cities as places. She presented a spatiotemporal model that links the spatial representations of cities with spatiotemporal processes. This model is built on top of a place ontology that distinguishes between the static view of places and the dynamic view of spatialtemporal processes. This model is further assessed for its potential use in spatiotemporal analysis, in particular in exploring spatiotemporal topological relations.

1.6 Studying Other Urban Problem Using Geospatial Analysis and Modeling
The set of papers presented in this section show that a diversity of urban problems can be studied using geospatial analysis and modeling. As indicated in the chapter title, Pietro Pagliardini, Sergio Porta and Nikos Salingaros

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(Chapter 17) outline the relationship between geospatial analysis and urban planning and design. They argued that geospatial analysis should be used to extract morphological rules from traditional settlements, and the rules can be used to redevelop modern cities in order to generate living cities. They believe that predictive and dynamic spatial models can help in constructing the new discipline of urban seeding that will substantially re-frame the existing discipline of architecture and urban planning. Their convincing discussions lead to some interesting insights towards urban structure and dynamics regarding urban planning and design. In seeking possible associations between risk factors and late-stage breast cancer diagnosis, Lan Mu, Fahui Wang and Sara McLafferty (Chapter 18) adopted a modified scalespace clustering method that considers adjacency in both spatial and attribute dimensions to minimize the loss of information in the clustering process. Their method is proved to be effective and better than existing methods in avoiding the modified areal unit problem (MAUP) effect in spatial analysis. Toward a better understanding of the intimate relationship between land use and transportation, Sungsoon Hwang and Jean-Claude Thill (Chapter 19) examined the impact of job accessibility on housing prices in both Buffalo and Seattle metropolitan areas. The authors adopted a hedonic regression modeling framework, and investigated the impacts from both local and global perspectives. It was found that job accessibility is positively associated with housing prices at the global scale, and that the impact of job accessibility on housing prices varies locally. In Chapter 20, Mark Horner and Michael Widener dealt with allocating relief goods by considering equity factor as well as efficiency. Their results showed that population heterogeneity has an important role in influencing appropriate facility placement. David Wheeler in Chapter 21 promoted a visual analytics approach to dealing with urban problems. The study is not designed to tackle any urban problem per se, although census undercount is used as an illustrative case study. In essence, this paper is about visualization tools for diagnosing correlation in estimated regression coefficients. This work fits well with visual approaches, or more precisely the visual analytics approach (Thomas and Cook 2005), in geospatial analysis and modeling.

1.7 Conclusion
We have tried in this opening chapter to elaborate on the role of geospatial analysis and modeling in understanding urban structure and dynamics. The chapters demonstrated how geospatial analysis and modeling in the context of GIS contribute to the study of various urban problems. We have seen how GIS in general, and geospatial analysis and modeling in particular, have been evolving in their capabilities to gain insights into urban systems. Such insights provide a significant input to spatial planning and policy making for urban

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development in the future. In terms of future development, the increasing availability of geospatial information through positioning technology, geosensor networks, and human volunteers is adding enormous challenge for geospatial analysts. In this regard, geospatial analysis and modeling need to seek more collaborations and contributions from GIS related fields such as spatial data mining, geovisualization, and uncertainty analysis.

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Thomas, J.J. & Cook, K.A. (Eds.) (2005). Illuminating the path: the R&D agenda for visual Analytics. National Visualization and Analytics Center. (Richland, WA) Watts, D.J. & Strogatz, S.H. (1998). Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393, 440442 Zipf, G.K. (1949). Human behavior and the principles of least effort, (Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley)