ABSTRACT
Land use change is one of the essential fields in urban analysis. The question is, what changes are caused by what factors and in what structure? This question has been the theme of a number of studies, which are broadly grouped into two: those focusing on the relationship between various forms of land use and their causal factors, and those attempting to develop estimation models for such changes. Many studies in the former group ascribe the changes to a major factor such as land use zoning (Yoshikawa et al., 1990; Chishaki et al., 1990). Not a few studies in the latter group, land use changes, are estimated on the basis of one factor-less frequent cases of adjacent land use. Since the 1990s, new models have been attempted by what is known as the Markov chain model (Osaragi and Masuda, 1995), the genetic algorithm (Takizawa et al., 1997), and the cellular automaton model (Arai et al., 1999), all with the background of development and diffusion of electronic data in recent years.
