Urban Boundary Demarcation—An iCN Model Approach

Amila Jayasinghe, Lindamullage Don Charls Hasintha Nawod Kalpana, Charithmali Chethika Abenayake and Pelpola Kankanamge Seneviratne Mahanama
Additional contact information
Amila Jayasinghe: Urban Simulation Lab, Department of Town & Country Planning, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka
Lindamullage Don Charls Hasintha Nawod Kalpana: Urban Simulation Lab, Department of Town & Country Planning, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka
Charithmali Chethika Abenayake: Urban Simulation Lab, Department of Town & Country Planning, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka
Pelpola Kankanamge Seneviratne Mahanama: Urban Simulation Lab, Department of Town & Country Planning, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka

Social Sciences, 2021, vol. 10, issue 12, 1-17

Abstract: During the last two decades, determining the urban boundaries of cities has become one of the major concerns in the urban and regional planning subject domains. Many scholars have tried to model the change of urban boundaries as it helps with sustainable development, population projections and social policy making, but such efforts have been futile, owing to the complex nature of urbanization and the theoretical and technical limitations of the proposed applications. Hence, many countries continue to rely on the administrative boundary demarcation, which rarely represent the actual urbanizing pattern. In such context, this study utilized the “Intersection-Based Clustered Network Model—(iCN Model)” to determine the urban boundaries of cities and selected Sri Lanka as the study area and considered few cities to test the model empirically, with satellite imagery classified urban boundaries. The findings of the study depict that the iCN Model is capable of capturing the complex and dynamic socioeconomic interdependencies of cities via the transportation network configurations. Therefore, the proposed approach is an excellent proxy to derive the urban boundaries of cities, which correspond with the same, derived by the satellite imageries. The proposed model is entirely based on open-source GIS applications and is free to implement and modify using the methods described in this paper.

Keywords: cities; urban boundary; population; network analysis; transportation network; urban agglomeration; spatial analysis; urban simulation; fractal geometry; percolation; urban planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/12/448/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/12/448/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:10:y:2021:i:12:p:448-:d:685489

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().