Abstract
In urban management, many spatial limits of urban areas such as administration boundaries, postal zones, urban planning
zones, traffic analysis zones, etc. were designed by different departments for specific purposes, often resulting in an
inconsistent boundary among them. The social statistics data based on these limits are difficult to use by other
departments due to this inconsistency. To address this issue, the concept of urban basic grid was proposed in this paper,
which is defined as the urban basic grid. An algorithm based on hierarchical spatial reasoning is designed to help
delineating urban basic grid, taking into consideration various factors, including land use, geometry compactness, and
major road. By taking Jiangan District, Wuhan as a case study, the research made an experiment to testify whether the
existing urban planning zone, traffic analysis zones can be generated from the aggregation of the defined basic grids. The
result indicated that the urban basic grid can be used to aggregate higher level urban grid, and therefore the social
statistics data collected through these grids can be shared among other departments.
