Abstract
Urban activities are concentrated in the central areas where is essential place to be recognized for urban development and transport policy. However the definition of urban central area is not necessarily clear and it is usually given heuristically or defined based on large scale transportation survey. Large cities in developing countries which is growing rapidly forms urban centers dynamically. For the analysis of urban and transport planning, a simple and prompt method for capturing urban centers is needed.
Purpose of this study is to examine the applicability of night time light remote sensing data to the extraction of urban centers. Targeting at Japanese three metropolitan areas, Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya where large scale origin-destination survey data is published, the performance of determination of urban centers by night time lights is examined by comparing with the destination trip demand. As a result, the night time light data is clarified to have a performance to distinguish urban centers. Applying this method to the grid level analysis, several satellite centers in suburban area are also determined which are not selected in the zonal level analysis.
