Impact of urban planning on household's residential decisions: An agent-based simulation model for Vienna☆

Interest in assessing the sustainability of socio-ecological systems of urban areas has increased notably, with additional attention generated due to the fact that half the world's population now lives in cities. Urban areas face both a changing urban population size and increasing sustainability issues in terms of providing good socioeconomic and environmental living conditions. Urban planning has to deal with both challenges. Households play a major role by being affected by urban planning decisions on the one hand and by being responsible – among many other factors – for the environmental performance of a city (e.g. energy use). We here present an agent-based decision model referring to the city of Vienna, the capital of Austria, with a population of about 1.7 million (2.3 million within the metropolitan area, the latter being more than 25% of Austria's total population). Since the early 1990s, after decades of negative population growth, Vienna has been experiencing a steady increase in population, mainly driven by immigration. The aim of the agent-based decision model is to simulate new residential patterns of different household types based on demographic development and migration scenarios. Model results were used to assess spatial patterns of energy use caused by different household types in the four scenarios (1) conventional urban planning, (2) sustainable urban planning, (3) expensive centre and (4) no green area preference. Outcomes show that changes in preferences of households relating to the presence of nearby green areas have the most important impact on the distribution of households across the small-scaled city area. Additionally, the results demonstrate the importance of the distribution of different household types regarding spatial patterns of energy use.