Simulating urban growth boundaries using a patch-based cellular automaton with economic and ecological constraints

Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) have been applied in many rapid urbanizing areas to alleviate the problems of urban sprawl. Although empirical research has stressed the importance of ecological protection in UGB delineation, existing UGB models lack a component for the assessment of ecologically sensitive areas. To address this problem, we develop an innovative method that is capable of simulating UGB alternatives with economic and ecological constraints. Our method employs a patch-based cellular automaton (i.e. SA-Patch-CA) for simulating future urban growth, constrained by the ecological protection areas produced by an agent-based land allocation optimization model (AgentLA). The delineation of UGBs is also based on the estimated future urban land demand derived from support vector regression (SVR). The proposed method is applied in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), China. Three scenarios are designed to represent different objectives of future industrial transitions. The results indicate that increasing the shares of low energy consumption industries and tertiary industries can effectively reduce urban land demand. By overlapping the simulations, we found that the areal agreement of the simulated UGBs among the three scenarios accounts for approximately 88% of the total area. These areas can then be considered as the primary locations for establishing the UGBs.