Application of Multi-Criteria Analysis to Urban Land-Use Planning

It is generally agreed that developed countries should reduce their energy consumption, which directly and indirectly causes climate change and other global issues. Therefore, it is necessary to improve urban land-use planning in order to decrease energy consumption while maintaining a desirable lifestyle, although optimization of urban land-use is difficult because it includes many conflicting objectives. Multi-criteria model analysis can be used to help analyze such complex problems. In such an analysis, decision variables are the shares of floor area allocated to a certain type of building and at a certain type of district. Building types vary in the heights described as the ratio of the building area to the floor area. District types vary in the density described as the ratio of the district area to the floor area. In the primary model, three criteria will be considered: minimizing the energy consumption for transportation and construction of buildings, maximizing the area of open spaces in the city, and maximizing the area of natural and agricultural land-use outside the city. After the case study using the test data set of Tokyo, I obtained the following results. This analysis can help to plan the adequate urban land-use that solves various trade-offs between conflicting objectives