Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
17.5
Improving Scientific Reasoning and Methods
for Conventional Spatial Models
17.5.1 Three Dimensionality of Urban Activities
Among many, the two most scare resources in any urban areas could be “land” and
“capital”. One of the distinctive features that cities are different from rural areas is
the intensive use of urban land. The intensive use of urban land is implicitly
analyzed by earlier founding fathers of location theory using land rent functions
(see e.g. Isard
1956
; pp. 172-206). This fact alone manifests that the traditional
two-dimensional urban activity models cannot describe nor analyze the urban
issues adequately because urban activities prevail in three-dimensional spaces
and thus they have to be analyzed by three-dimensional spatial activity models.
The three-dimensional urban activities can be presented in a spatil urban model by
introducing three-dimensional input-output models as shown in Mills (
1972
,
1974
,
1975
), Kim (
1978a
,
b
,
1979
,
1983
,
1997
) and in Rho and Kim (
1989
). Figure
17.1
show how three-dimensional urban activities cab be represented in an input-out
model context.
Conventional wisdom says that a compact city is more energy efficient than a
city of similar size with dispersed patterns of land use and lower densities. The
transportation costs for horizontal movements would certainly be higher in the
latter. However, the conventional wisdom needs to be carefully analyzed for
developing spatial analysis for future cities.
In any economic establishment, lower structures have been preferred over high-
rise buildings as long as the cost of access to work places is not prohibitive (Gordon
and Richardson
1997
). And yet the reason that skyscrapers exist in a city is due to
the scarcity of land. High-rise buildings require additional resources to maintain
and operate the elevators, deliver water to the full height of the building, and
remove large concentrations of waste. For example, the activities conducted within
the Empire State Building use 181,000 gal of water, produce about 35 t of waste,
and consume 0.1 million kWh each day. The annual cost for energy for the building
is estimated to be $11.6 million
17
(Kim
2013
, pp. 39). Willis Tower in Chicago
uses a total annual energy equivalent to 187,500 barrels of crude oils.
18
Two-dimensional models of urban planning are unable to properly analyze urban
activities since two-dimensional models cannot capture the three-dimensional
nature of urban activities (Kim
1989
; Rho and Kim
1989
).
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