Urban Land Allocation Model of Territorial Expansion by Urban Planners and Housing Developers

Abstract

Agent-based models have recently been proposed as potential tools to support urban planning due to their capacity to simulate complex behaviors. The complexity of the urban development process arises from strong interactions between various components driven by different agents. AMEBA (agent-based model for the evolution of urban areas) is a prototype of an exploratory, spatial, agent-based model that considers the main agents involved in the urban development process (urban planners, developers, and the population). The prototype consists of three submodels (one for each agent) that have been developed independently and present the same structure. However, the first two are based on a land use allocation technique, and the last one, as well as their integration, on an agent-based model approach. This paper describes the conceptualization and performance of the submodels that represent urban planners and developers, who are the agents responsible for officially launching expansion and defining the spatial allocation of urban land. The prototype was tested in the Corredor del Henares (an urban-industrial area in the Region of Madrid, Spain), but is sufficiently flexible to be adapted to other study areas and generate different future urban growth contexts. The results demonstrate that this combination of agents can be used to explore various policy-relevant research questions, including urban system interactions in adverse political and socioeconomic scenarios.

Participatory visioning for building disruptive future scenarios for transport and land use planning

“…More than a million people live in the 17 municipalities located in the Henares Corridor (INE, 2019). It is one of the most industrialised places in the MAM, originating a relevant number of commuters (Barreira-González et al, 2019;Cantergiani and Gómez-Delgado, 2018).…”

Actas del XIX Congreso de Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica. TIG al servicio de los ODS Zaragoza, 12 a 14 de septiembre de 2022

“…En los estudios realizados hasta el momento, tanto los planificadores como la población aparecen como los actores determinantes en la simulación de la expansión urbana y la ocupación residencial. Sin embargo, la figura de los Promotores Inmobiliarios (PI), con un papel determinante en el proceso de construcción residencial, aparece en muchos menos estudios y siempre de manera parcial o definidos a partir de unas reglas de comportamiento muy básicas y determinísticas, sin, por supuesto, considerar la diferenciación de distintos tipos de PI actuando de manera simultánea en el territorio objeto de estudio (Alghais y Pullar, 2018;Cantergiani y Gómez-Delgado, 2018;Filatova, 2015;Kaviari et al, 2019;Ligmann-Zielinska, 2009;Mustafa et al, 2017;Tan et al, 2015;Zhuge et al, 2016).…”

Thinking the unthinkable: The design of disruptive visions for land use and transport integration

“…More than a million people live in the 17 municipalities located in the Henares Corridor (INE, 2021). It is one of the most industrialised places in the MAM, originating a relevant number of commuters (Barreira-González et al, 2019;Cantergiani and Gómez-Delgado, 2018).…”