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Usui Lab (Measurement and Analysis Lab)
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A lab for urban morphology measurement and analysis that measures, understands, and improves urban space.
AboutAbout the lab
Measuring, understanding, and improving the shape of cities.
Usui Lab (Urban Morphology Measurement and Analysis Lab) conducts research and education to measure, understand, and improve urban space.
The lab was founded in April 2024 at Chiba Institute of Technology, and since April 2026 it has been carrying out research and education as a new lab at Chiba University.
'Measurement' refers to map-based measurement and surveying in GIS, 'understanding' to mathematical modeling and GIScience, and 'improvement' to policy and spatial design.
Using urban planning, urban morphology, and spatial information science, the lab covers scales from buildings to sites, blocks, districts, and wide areas, with particular emphasis on 'form' and 'quantification.'
Students' research topics are chosen according to their interest in cities and their intuitive awareness of problems.
Key terms
- Urban morphology
- The study of how urban form, such as buildings, sites, and road networks, is structured
- GIS
- Geographic information system. A system that overlays location data on maps so that measurement and analysis can be carried out
- Building count density
- An indicator of how densely built-up an area is, expressed as the number of buildings in a district of a given size
NewsLab news
A book co-authored by Prof. Usui, 'Analysis and Visualization of Regional and Social Issues Using GIS,' has been published
A paper by Prof. Usui and colleagues was published in Networks and Spatial Economics
A paper was accepted by the international journal Networks and Spatial Economics
A paper by Prof. Usui and colleagues was published in Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ)
A paper by Prof. Usui and colleagues was published in Theory and Applications of GIS
ResearchResearch themes
The lab conducts research useful for measuring, understanding, and improving urban space, at scales from individual buildings to sites, blocks, districts, and wide areas. It builds theories and tools for capturing urban form quantitatively and for clearly considering the relationship between parts and whole.
*Illustrative imageRelationship Between Site Shape and District Density
Urban space is intricately composed of building sites of various sizes and shapes. The lab is developing a theory that derives the average size and shape of building sites, and their variation, from a district's building count density and road length density (and average road width).
*Illustrative imageBuilding Layout and Assessment of Living Environments
The distance between the walls of adjacent buildings is essential for assessing fire spread risk, noise, odors, and privacy. The lab defines adjacency geometrically and studies methods for estimating the distribution of these distances from district density.
*Illustrative imageDelineating Urban Areas
The extent of an urban area changes depending on how it is delineated. The lab is developing a method to delineate urban areas based on the relationship between building distribution and the maintenance costs of road networks and similar infrastructure, enabling urban expansion and shrinkage to be evaluated from a consistent perspective.
*Illustrative imageEstimating Stay Population and Spacing Between People
Mobile phone location data is hard to obtain and does not include elevation data. Based on stochastic geometry, the lab developed a method to estimate, from stay population data for 500 m grid cells, the number of people without sufficient distance between them in three-dimensional urban space and how that number changes.
MembersFaculty
The members of Usui Lab are faculty and undergraduate students.As of 2026
- ProfessorHiroyuki Usui
VoicesStudent voices
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Report an errorAbout the images
The top and research theme images are illustrative and were not taken at the lab. They are cropped from Wikimedia Commons images. Cropped CC BY-SA images are provided under the same CC BY-SA license as the original (version shown on each line).
- Top image: “Karte Berlin Schwarzplan” Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) / CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)
- Relationship Between Site Shape and District Density: “Population Density in the Boston Urban Area in 2020” Lightandtruth / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Building Layout and Assessment of Living Environments: “Leeds Urban Square, East Street - geograph.org.uk - 7086133” Stephen Craven / CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)
- Delineating Urban Areas: “Edinburgh urban area (settlement area)” Elianfoo / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Estimating Stay Population and Spacing Between People: “City-urban-crowd-cityscape-tourist-uk-1060732” https://pxhere.com/es/photo/1060732 / CC0 (cropped)
- Related lab (松浦研究室): “Niso-Udatsu-no-Machinami ac (3)” Asturio Cantabrio / CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (丸山喜久研究室): “Shin-Tomei Expressway 20120909” Batholith / Public domain (cropped)
- Related lab (村木研究室): “Tokyo Tower At Dusk ( )” Foooomio / CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
- Related lab (鈴木弘樹研究室
（Suzuki-lab） ): “An architectural model of the British Library” Robert-brook / CC0 (cropped)
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