Unified computable urban economic model

The computable urban economic (CUE) model is a tool for analyzing real urban economies and evaluating urban polices in practice. The CUE model can output a set of variables which describe a real urban economy: a distribution of locators or activities including households and firms, a distribution of land use including residential, commercial, manufacturing, business, agricultural and other types and a distribution of land price/rent and building price/rent. The CUE model, working with transport models consistent with microeconomic theory, can also output a distribution of passenger trips aggregated by OD, mode and path, and a distribution of freight cargo as well. Urban models that belong to the CUE model family have been developed and applied since the late 1980s. This paper first presents a general form of the CUE model, describing its mathematical forms and theoretical features. Then, the paper introduces several models in the CUE model family developed in Japan and shows that a CUE model constructed on the basis of the general form comprises the existing models. The paper compares the models with each other from the viewpoints of experiences of application, and mathematical function form, and provides clear insight into the relationship between the models. Copyright The Author(s) 2013