Simulation of natural land use zoning under free-market and incremental development control regimes

Abstract

This paper is the third in a series which presents an approach to embedding micro-economic models of community and developer behaviour within a Cellular Automata framework. The first two papers (Webster and Wu, 1998a, b) present the economic theory and simulation methodology respectively. Here we concentrate on a discussion of the simulation results. The purpose is to demonstrate the richness of information that comes from a model which explicitly models space as well as behaviour. Two illustrative simulations are defined to represent cities evolving under very different regulative regimes. The simulations yield a range of urban performance indicators which are discussed in some detail.