A Distance-Driven Urban Simulation Model (DISUSIM): Accounting For Urban Morphology At Multiple Landscape Levels

Abstract

Although distance-related rules have been incorporated into many urban models, their potential for advancing spatially explicit urban growth modeling via the regulation of urban development morphologies has not yet been fully explored. This study proposed an urban simulation model (DisUSIM) which uses three distance-driven components to regulate urban morphology at the landscape, class, and patch levels, respectively. The landscape-level component regulates the spatiotemporal distribution of urban land based on rules related to distance to city centers. The class-level component applies a modified exponential model with the distance to previous urban patches to control how far (or near) new urban development may expand. At the patch level, a patch generation engine creates urban patches of given sizes with patch shapes determined by their distances to the initial patch seeds. DisUSIM was applied to a megacity, Wuhan, China, under six simulation experiments that involves distance-driven regulations at different levels. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the model and its components, as supported by both cell-level agreement and pattern-level similarity. The overarching contribution of DisUSIM lies in providing a distance-driven framework for convenient simulation of urban dynamics in situations in which information on driving factors and mechanisms are unknown in advance.

Keywords: urban growth simulation, Urban Morphology, distance, cellular automata, patch