Scenario Analysis of the Future Urban Land Use in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area

• Published in: ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 169 - 179
• Main Authors: NAKAMICHI, Kumiko, YAMAGATA, Yoshiki, SEYA, Hajime
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: SOCIETY OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, JAPAN 2011; 社団法人 環境科学会
• Subjects: Adaptability; Boundary conditions; compact city; Emissions; Land use; Land use model; Metropolitan areas; Mitigation; scenario analysis; Spatial analysis; suburbanization; Tokyo Metropolitan Area; Urban areas; Urban planning; コンパクトシティ; シナリオ分析; 土地利用モデル; 東京都市圏; 郊外化; Japan, Honshu, Tokyo Prefect., Tokyo
• ISSN: 0915-0048; 1884-5029
• DOI: 10.11353/sesj.24.169

The Tokyo Metropolitan Area is the largest urban area in the world. It is important to project the future distribution of population and land use in the area not only in terms of the urban planning, but also in terms of the mitigation and adaptation to climate change. This research studies spatially explicit high-resolution land use change scenarios in the metropolitan area with a newly developed land use model. In this study the microdistrict (cho-cho-moku) is used as the spatial analysis unit which allows realistic scenarios with fine spatial resolution to be constructed, whereas a traditional land use model is usually constructed at the municipality level. This study demonstrates two extreme scenarios—urban concentration (compact city) and dispersion for showing the maximum range of the future land use distribution. The projected land use distribution can be applied as the boundary condition for urban climate models, and also has a potential to provide useful information to urban practitioners. The developed scenarios provide the scenario dependent projections of parameters such as anthropogenic heat emission, vegetation cover, etc.