Abstract
Changes of use and site location of buildings are critical and basic information for urban planning, urban development regulation, and preparation plan of infrastructure. Though detailed time-series data of buildings are now available, most of the earlier studies are qualitative analysis. This paper introduces a new quantitative method for analyzing building use and location in urban area, especially in middle scale commercial districts. First, we plot the gross floor area along major streets in the target districts, where the vertical axis indicates the percentage on sum total of gross floor area and the horizontal axis indicates the distance from the core of the district. Then we calculate two indices measuring accumulation tendency of gross floor area relative to uniformly distributed case. Finally, we propose a hypothesis when the use and distribution of buildings change drastically in commercial districts in Tokyo by analyzing detailed building data for fifteen years.
