An analysis of urban spatial structure using comprehensive prominence of irregular areas

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new notion on prominent areas of a city defined by two types of comprehensive prominence for identifying urban spatial structure. Not only geometric attributes and topological attributes but also thematic attributes of irregular areas (e.g. districts of a city) are used to define these indices. In the paper, first the topological prominence related to geometric attributes such as size, location, and shape of areas is constructed by spatial weight matrix. Second, for finding comprehensive prominences, the principle axis factor model is adopted, and the first factor score is defined as the comprehensive prominence 1. Then, the proportion of thematic attributes of each area occupied in across the city is used to define the comprehensive prominence 2. Finally, we use these comprehensive prominences to extract some important regions in Matsudo City of Chiba Prefecture in Japan. The areas composing those regions show a high topological prominence, have a large population, have many offices, and are located around the train station.