FUNCTIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE STREET SEGMENTS REFERRING TO THE FLOOR USE OF THE JOINING BUILDINGS

Abstract

Revitalization of downtown shopping areas to attract people for strolling, shopping, or dinning there has become one of the important tasks of the downtown planning. As the first step of studies, the authors, assuming the distribution of multiple “neighborhood”, clusters of distinctive and fashionable shops developed along both main shopping arcades and human-scale streets behind them, will promote visitors' strolling activities in the downtown, analyzed a present formation of the neighborhood in the downtown Kumamoto. For the study, the authors, setting 2484 observation points along the all streets in the study area at 10m pitch, counted the number of floor-use units by type of use for all floors of all buildings that locate within 30m buffer circle of each observation point, and then classified each point applying the primary component analysis and the cluster analysis to those floor-use data, as well as several additional data that represent building size and location feature.Assuming a case that five or more contiguous observation points are classified as the same character represents formation of a distinctive neighborhood, the authors identified 80 neighborhoods, and, then, pointed out both advantages and disadvantages of present neighborhood structure in promoting visitors strolling activities. The case study for Kumamoto showed the applicability of proposed procedure for the similar planning task.