A Study on The Preference Function Characteristic of Location of Urban User

Abstract

For the purpose to simulate the changing process of land use pattern in urbanization, it is necessary to quantify the preference functions of various land users, such as commerce, industry and household.
In this paper we have proposed a new method for the estimation of the preference functions by means of statistic discriminant function, which are composed of the accessibility to some urban activities, amenity level and other social and natural environment.
First of all, we assumed that the behavior of each land user is making his utility maximum within the limit of the budget for land. Then on this assumption we defined the fact that land user located a certain land means that he prefers it to other lands where he did not locate, and have estimated the preference functions of commerce, industry and household respectively, using data on the land use map of Osaka Prefecture, 1965.
The result of the estimation shows as follows: First, each estimated preference function adequately justifies our assumption. Second, the preference function of commerce is similar to that of household, but not to that of industry. Third, the preference function of commerce is strongly effected both by accessibility to the C. B. D. and neighboring land use; that of industry by the industrial water supply and that of household by accessibility, construction cost and public utility level.