Modelling future impacts of urban development in Kuwait with the use of ABM and GIS

During the last six decades, Kuwait has experienced rapid and unprecedented population growth with only a small increase in the urban areas. The alarming rise in urban density in Kuwait has caused issues for the residents' lifestyles, the economy and the environment. These issues have been aggravated by urban planning which perpetuated a city-centric urban form without modelling the impacts of current patterns of urban growth. A spatial model using Agent Based Modelling (ABM) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is proposed to model disaggregate future changes in land-use patterns given forecast population estimates and planning policies. The two main impacts considered are housing shortage and traffic congestion, as these are the two most significant social impacts for Kuwaitis. This article discusses the design methodology and parameterization of the ABM and the agent groups. It characterizes urban growth by rules for different citizen groups, historical growth patterns and the influence of decision-makers. The model is validated against data for the period 1995-2015 and simulations run to 2050; the results predict that continued city-centric growth will aggravate the problems, with more than 50% increase in housing shortage and congestion unless the government intervenes to rectify the situation.

[1]  Alison Todes,et al.  Urban growth and strategic spatial planning in Johannesburg, South Africa , 2012 .

[2]  Abdul-Ilah Abu-Ayyash Urban development and planning strategies in Kuwait , 1980 .

[3]  D. Bengston,et al.  Public policies for managing urban growth and protecting open space: policy instruments and lessons learned in the United States , 2004 .

[4]  E. Lambin,et al.  Predicting land-use change , 2001 .

[5]  Jonas De Vos,et al.  Transportation policy as spatial planning tool; reducing urban sprawl by increasing travel costs and clustering infrastructure and public transportation , 2013 .

[6]  K. Seto,et al.  Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools , 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[7]  Pascal Perez,et al.  Simulating Transport and Land Use Interdependencies for Strategic Urban Planning - An Agent Based Modelling Approach , 2015, Syst..

[8]  Ruth L. Steiner,et al.  The Evolution of Transportation Concurrency and Urban Development Pattern in Miami-Dade County, Florida , 2014 .

[9]  Jacek Malczewski,et al.  GIS-based land-use suitability analysis: a critical overview , 2004 .

[10]  P. Waddell UrbanSim: Modeling Urban Development for Land Use, Transportation, and Environmental Planning , 2002 .

[11]  H. M’henni,et al.  Energy Consumption, Economic Growth and CO2 Emissions in Middle East and North African Countries , 2012, Social Science Research Network.

[12]  R. Pontius,et al.  Modeling Land-Use and Land-Cover Change , 2006 .

[13]  A. Rizzo,et al.  Rapid urban development and national master planning in Arab Gulf countries. Qatar as a case study , 2014 .

[14]  J. Franklin,et al.  Forecasts of habitat loss and fragmentation due to urban growth are sensitive to source of input data. , 2011, Journal of environmental management.

[15]  Nabil Kartam,et al.  Impact of safety belt use on road accident injury and injury type in Kuwait. , 2003, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[16]  E. Malecki,et al.  Labor migration to world cities: with a research agenda for the Arab Gulf , 2007 .

[17]  Andrew Crooks,et al.  Introduction to Agent-Based Modelling , 2012 .

[18]  Abu-Ayyash A.-Y. Planning development towns in Kuwait , 1981 .

[19]  K S Jadaan,et al.  Traffic accidents in Kuwait: an economic dimension. , 1990, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[20]  Daniel G. Brown,et al.  Effects of Heterogeneity in Residential Preferences on an Agent-Based Model of Urban Sprawl , 2006 .

[21]  John H. Miller,et al.  Complex adaptive systems - an introduction to computational models of social life , 2009, Princeton studies in complexity.

[22]  Jan K. Brueckner,et al.  Infrastructure financing and urban development:: The economics of impact fees , 1997 .

[23]  Brendan Williams,et al.  Projecting alternative urban growth patterns: The development and application of a remote sensing assisted calibration framework for the Greater Dublin Area , 2016 .

[24]  Farah Al-Nakib,et al.  REVISITING ḤAḌAR AND BADŪ IN KUWAIT: CITIZENSHIP, HOUSING, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A DICHOTOMY , 2014, International Journal of Middle East Studies.

[25]  Eric Vaz,et al.  Spatiotemporal simulation of urban growth patterns using agent-based modeling: The case of Tehran , 2013 .

[26]  Eric Bonabeau,et al.  Agent-based modeling: Methods and techniques for simulating human systems , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[27]  G. Duranton,et al.  Urban Growth and Transportation , 2008 .

[28]  Graham. Parkhurst,et al.  The paradox of intensification , 2011 .

[29]  J. Gareth Polhill,et al.  The ODD protocol: A review and first update , 2010, Ecological Modelling.

[30]  Piotr Jankowski,et al.  Exploring normative scenarios of land use development decisions with an agent-based simulation laboratory , 2010, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[31]  Michael Batty,et al.  A Generic Framework for Computational Spatial Modelling , 2012 .

[32]  Thomas Blaschke,et al.  A spatially explicit backcasting approach for sustainable land-use planning , 2016 .

[33]  P. Gerber,et al.  Growth modelling and the management of urban sprawl: Questioning the performance of sustainable planning policies , 2015 .

[34]  S. Al-Hathloul,et al.  Planning in the Middle East, moving toward the future , 2004 .

[35]  T. Edwin Chow,et al.  A GIS toolset for automated partitioning of urban lands , 2014, Environ. Model. Softw..

[36]  D. Birch Toward a Stage Theory of Urban Growth , 1971 .

[37]  Piotr Jankowski,et al.  Agent-Based Models as Laboratories for Spatially Explicit Planning Policies , 2007 .

[38]  Sharifa Alshalfan The right to housing in Kuwait: an urban injustice in a socially just system , 2013 .

[39]  Liping Wang,et al.  Multi-agent based modeling of spatiotemporal dynamical urban growth in developing countries: simulating future scenarios of Lianyungang city, China , 2014, Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment.

[40]  M. V. Maarseveen,et al.  Spatial–temporal analysis of urban growth and transportation in Jeddah City, Saudi Arabia , 2013 .