Using building types and demographic data to improve our understanding and use of urban sprawl simulation

Abstract. Many studies, using various modeling approaches and simulation tools have been made in the field of urban growth. A multitude of models, with common or specific features, has been developed to reconstruct the spatial occupation and changes in land use. However, today most of urban growth techniques just use the historical geographic data such as urban, road and excluded maps to simulate the prospective urban maps. In this paper, adding buildings and population data as urban fabric factors, we define different urban growth simulation scenarios. Each simulation corresponds to policies that are more or less restrictive of space considering what these territories can accommodate as a type of building and as a global population.

Among the urban growth modeling techniques, dynamic models, those based on Cellular Automata (CA) are the most common for their applications in urban areas. CA can be integrated with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to have a high spatial resolution model with computational efficiency. The SLEUTH model is one of the cellular automata models, which match the dynamic simulation of urban expansion and could be adapted to morphological model of the urban configuration and fabric.

Using the SLEUTH model, this paper provides different simulations that correspond to different land priorities and constraints. We used common data (such as topographic, buildings and demography data) to improve the realism of each simulation and their adequacy with the real world. The findings allow having different images of the city of tomorrow to choose and reflect on urban policies.