ICT
The way in which a city develops and the manner in which people travel through that city are inextricably linked, but at present there are few models capable of looking at both of these issues in an integrated manner. SustainCity is a project that addresses the modelling and computational issues of integrating modern transport simulations with the latest micro-simulation land use models
Life in the city
The modelling of urban development is no easy task. In simplified terms, a city can be
understood as a group of agents
interacting within a specific space. Some of these agents, like households and firms, need to locate and therefore generate demand for land or buildings. Other agents, like land-owners or developers, produce buildings and dwellings that are offered to households and firms. A third type of agent is the government, who regulates the land use and housing market. In terms of the transport system within a
city, it is the location of households and firms
that generates journeys and the
associated externalities, such as pollution. Of course, the location choice of households and firms are also affected by the conditions of
the transport system and these externalities. Increasing concerns about sustainable
development and the growth of urban areas have
brought forth in recent in the years a
renewed enthusiasm and need for the use of quantitative models
field of
transportation and spatial planning. Models that favour a microscopic approach, such as UrbanSim, have recently gained a lot of interest in both the land use and transport communities. Nevertheless,
these models
still require development to support a comprehensive analysis of
the main
environmental and socio-economic questions of
the sustainability of urban
growth and the relevant public policies. SustainCity is an FP7 project that aims
to go one step further in the field of state- of-the-art land use and transport models. “It is often the case that you will have separate models for transport and land
use, but they lack interaction and are thus inherently flawed,” says Balz Bodenmann. “Our aim is to bring them together in one interacting framework. “UrbanSim is quite famous now for its
success in the USA, but unfortunately the software does not work when it is applied in a European setting. One problem is that the demographics of European people are quite different, and also they behave differently. Last of all, and probably the most obvious difference, is that the geometry of European settlements are very different. If you look at a satellite photograph of city in the USA, you can see that the roads are aligned in very neat rectangles, whereas European cities tend to look a lot more chaotic.” UrbanSim
is open-source software,
meaning that anyone who wishes to can freely access, modify and redistribute the
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Insight Publishers | Projects
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