Urban land value, Accessibility and Night Light Data: A Case Study in China

In this paper, we use night light imagery data at two scales – the city and within the city. Since many of the urban characteristics of cities including traffic and paved area are correlated with each other we derive components for our sample of 286 cities in China. We then correlate these measures for average DN values from night light imagery at the center and periphery of the city (using buffers of 5km and 20km). We also test at four points of time in the period 2002-2012 to assess changes over time if any. We then focus on Beijing and assess the correlation between night light imagery derived DN values, land price and an accessibility indicator. In deriving spatial accessibility we use micro scale indicators such as time distance to the city center, and employment centers by transit and automobile. We use spatial regression and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models. _______________________________________________________ S. Srinivasan (Corresponding author) China Project, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Email: [email protected] D. Yu Institute of Geographical Sciences & Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, Email: [email protected] CUPUM 2015 309-Paper