From city center to suburbs: Developing a timeline-based TOD assessment model to explore the dynamic changes in station areas of Tokyo metropolitan area

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is regarded as a planning concept for urban sustainable development that has been increasingly embraced worldwide in recent years. However, scholars rarely assess the sustainability of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) station areas over a period of time. This study, building upon the existing TOD assessment model based on node-place-ecology, introduces the concepts of “low-carbon cities” and a “timeline-based.” Focuses on whether the three dimensions of TOD station areas—node, place, and carbon—are dynamically balanced over time towards sustainable development. More specifically, this study starting from a micro-level perspective, takes the 70 stations on the Odakyu line as a clue, a railway that spans Tokyo and Kanagawa, aiming to develop a quantitative assessment model for sustainable TOD based on node-place-carbon, and to summarize the spatial dynamic changes of the 70 station areas in the Tokyo metropolitan area from 2011 to 2019 through the principles of sustainable development line (SDL) and K-means cluster analysis. The results indicate that after 8 years, the overall development of the station areas is moving towards sustainability, but there are still some station areas that deviate to some extent. And also, we observed that the trend of monopolization in the central station areas of the Tokyo metropolitan area is continuously strengthening. We believe that the sustainable assessment model developed in this study can provide constructive reference for the planning and design of cities, especially metropolitan areas, around the world.