Residential agents and land use change modelling
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Date
2010Author
Fontaine, Corentin M.
Metadata
Abstract
Urbanisation is driven by the complex interactions of many physical
and human factors where human actions and decisions, individually and
collectively, ultimately shape the patterns of urban landscapes. Agentbased
modelling is an emerging technique in land use science that is
designed to study multiple heterogeneous and locally interacting active
entities within a system. An example of a local interaction is the request
made by residents to planners for building permits. The decisions of
planners in response to this request leads to emergent properties at an
aggregate level such as city growth, assuming no equilibrium conditions.
This thesis develops a framework for investigating in space and in
time future residential land use change over a polycentric region using
a case study of East Anglia, UK. Conceptually, the framework views
the complexity of housing development in a system of cities (macrogeographical
level) as the visible and concrete outcome of interactions
between household demand for new dwellings (micro-geographical level) and
the supply of building permits by local planners (meso-geographical level).
Demand and supply are driven by household location preferences, as well
as local planning, and evolve over time, leading to future land use change
at speci c locations. The IPCC socio-economic scenarios are adapted to
describe plausible evolutions in these preferences and strategies in order
to evaluate di erent urban land use change pathways and the associated
potential consequences for people (e.g.
ooding risks) and the environment
(e.g. biodiversity loss from land fragmentation). Simulation of new housing
scenarios is undertaken within the agent-based modelling paradigm using
a new computer programme developed in NetLogo. Issues of sensitivity
analysis, validation, calibration and system complexity are addressed
throughout the thesis. The thesis contributes to the eld of landscape and
urban ecology by exploring urban complexity with a spatio-dynamic model
of residential location behaviour driven by human and natural variables.
As land use and land cover change is known to strongly a ect ecological
landscape functions and processes, understanding the relationships between
social and natural systems within changing landscapes helps to highlight
hotspots of potential pressure and their e ects on the natural environment
as part of an assessment of the possible ecological impacts of new urban
development.