Impact of Land-Use Differences on Block-Size Distribution in Tokyo

The morphology of street patterns is characterized by a probability distribution of the area of city blocks separated by an intersecting road network. The uniformity of block areas is closely related to differences in land use- e.g., whether the target region is a business or residential area. However, because of the difficulty in quantifying land use, no studies have examined block-area distribution's dependence on land use. In this study, we quantified the land use of the 23 wards of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area in Japan. To this end, we used the ratio of daytime-to-nighttime population (RDN), an indicator of population movement per day, and investigated its correlation with the exponent of the block-area distribution. The results showed a negative correlation between the exponent and RDN, denoting that wards centered on business areas, which attract many people, tend to exhibit a higher frequency of large blocks.