Organic Urban Boundaries and Clusters – Analyzing Singapore as an Example

Cities are dynamic complex systems evolving through their functions and human activities. While the regional boundaries are artificially created, dwellers move around them by walking, cycling or taking vehicles with various purposes and such movements in the cities generate “organic” boundaries. In this paper, we introduce how to extract such organic boundaries of cities based on the human mobility data and apply the method to analyze Singapore. We first create Voronoi cells, i.e. unit regions, of the city by using the public transportation and population datasets. Then we spatially interpolate the cells and create the mobility network of the interpolated cells by using the mobility dataset. Applying community detection unveils the organic regions in Singapore and we see that in those self-organizing regions the number of population and facilities have scaling relationships. We believe that our preliminary result is promising and shows its potential in various applications for urban planning, statistics and administration. Introduction Cities are complex systems with many spatial aspects evolving in a dynamic process. They are often divided into different districts or areas for various purposes such as urban planning, statistics and administration. While these drawn boundaries and areas are fundamentally artificial, cities have their own way of organizing its function and activities in reality. For example, a place may be well visited or used by people not only from the local area, but from a larger surrounding area or even cross other regions; several estates may be very well integrated and function as one cluster despite that they are located in different administrative areas. As such, if we can find a way to identify such natural and organic clusters, it will be very helpful for us to better understand the urban patterns, and guide the urban planning and policy work, e.g. gain better understanding in the city’s spatial patterns, determining the optimal distribution of resources and facilities. With the above in mind, the project intends to analyze Singapore as an example with real datasets to reveal how the city organizes its functions and activities, and how organic boundaries and clusters have been formed. The paper discusses how we can identify such organic clusters and what insights can be derived from the clusters. Singapore is a City-State located at the heart of South-east Asia. It is a dense city with only 720 km2 land area and a population of 5.6 million, making its population density at 7,780 person per km2. Since its independence in the 1960s, the city has made tremendous achievements in social and economic development, becoming one of the most liveable cities in Asia. An integrated planning and implementation approach has played a vital role in this progress. As part of the planning practice, the whole Singapore is divided into 55 Planning Areas (see Figure 1), which have been the fundamental geographic units for policy, planning and statistic purposes. The characteristics of each planning area varies, some Planning Areas include residential towns with a quarter million population, while some others have no population with monopoly uses such as nature reserve, industrial etc. At a more fine-grained level, all the land parcels are zoned into different land zones with permissible land use and density for developments (see Figure 2). Figure 1. Boundaries of Singapore’s 55 Planning Areas.