Modeling Spatial Structure of Residential Development with ArcView GIS

Author: Jay Lee
Organization: Kent State University

413 McGilvrey Hall
Kent State University
Kent, OH 44242-0001
USA

Phone: (330) 672-3222
Fax: (330) 672-4304
jlee@kent.edu

Residential development has been discussed extensively, mainly in the fields of urban economics and environmental sciences. By contrast, this project focuses on the operational issues of using ArcView GIS to construct models for spatial patterns of residential development.

With ArcView GIS and scripts developed for measuring spatial autocorrelation, we first identify locations of recent development and their spatial patterns. Both spatial adjacency and structural information of road frontage/subdivisions were calculated by using ArcView GIS functions. Together with sociodemographic attributes, we developed a project to model the spatial structure of residential development that allows past development to be evaluated and future development to be simulated.