| Abstract: | This paper develops a method for analyzing the change of surface, a continuous function defined over the two‐dimensional space. The surface change is represented by a scalar field in a spatiotemporal region. The region is divided into subregions called hills and waves which are based on the local form of the surface. They are both three‐dimensional tessellations of the spatiotemporal region, and provide an overview of the surface change. To summarize the tessellations, four operations are proposed: section, projection, merging, and graph representation. They extract useful information from tessellations to describe the structure of surface change. To test the validity of the method, the change of a retail cluster in Shinjuku and Shibuya area in Tokyo is analyzed. The empirical study yields some interesting findings that help us understand changes in the spatial structure of retailing. |
