W8: Actors and factors – bridging social science findings and urban land use change modeling
Organisers
Topics
- How do demography and global change modify human demands on natural resources, housing space and transportation networks?
- What are the spatial and land use effects caused by demographic change such as an increase of new household types like single households, cohabitation, single-parent families or flat-sharers?
- What are the socio-environmental consequences of ongoing urban sprawl and of the opposite process of urban shrinkage characterized by large residential and commercial vacancies? And
- How do we depict and model actors’ behaviour related to urban land use changes? How do we make our agent-based models as plausible as we can?
Description
Recent uneven land use development patterns and demographic change in urban areas challenge modellers, social scientists and spatial planners. Processes of growth and decline specifically affect the urban environment as well as the demand on natural resources. Social and environmental research is interested in a better understanding and ways of explaining the interactions between society and landscape in urban areas. Planners and policy makers are in charge of making life in cities attractive, secure and affordable. Moreover, sustainability and green infrastructure gather increasing importance in cities’ profiles. In these systems, the behaviour of the “urban actors” is characterized by highly heterogeneous and controversy decisions that directly impact on and shape of land use change (in terms of the intensification of land cultivation, the amount of land take as well as forms of land abandonment). This is the field of social sciences (sociology, political science, psychology, spatial planning) which carry out field research on effects of demographic change, urban sprawl and shrinkage. Their work delivers innovative empirical results in form of questionnaire survey data, series of interviews, perception data, agent profiles, behaviour settings through document analysis and observation. On the other hand, land use change model approaches have their strengths in setting up causal relationships between variables and to quantify them. Bringing together the strengths of both social science and modelling this symposium integrates ‘factors’ and ‘actors’ and thus intends to endeavour ways of bridging social science and quantitative as well as qualitative modelling to find answer on the above posed questions and others related to them. In doing so, the symposium focuses on presenting concepts, results and experiences of social-science data based simulation of processes and effects of urban land use change.