Urban growth simulation with UrbanSim

Rapid urban growth leads to the change of land use and land cover in many metropolitan areas around the world. Significant, uncontrollable changes can intensify a large number of social and physical problems. One endeavour is to anticipate and forecast future changes or trend of developments through urban simulation modelling. Ideally, microlevel models and knowledge of several detailed factors are required to forecast the urban growth. Most of the recent techniques to study urban growth, however, lack accuracy at the level of household or land parcel. This paper reports an investigation of the UrbanSim software comprising several functions for predicting urban growth. The capabilities of UrbanSim are presented and the linkage between UrbanSim and GIS is illustrated.