Linking land use transport models with environmental models (386)

Theme Track: Methods of Spatial Analysis - Land Use

Author:
Spiekermann, Klaus

Sustainable development has become a primary objective of urban land use and transport planning. However, there is uncertainty about the direction and extent different urban policies might contribute to sustainability of the urban system. One approach to assess the impacts of urban policies aiming at sustainability is to employ land use transport models. However, most current operational urban models are not capable of capturing important aspects of urban sustainability because their zone-based spatial resolution is too coarse to represent other environmental phenomena than total resource use, energy consumption or CO2 emission. Modelling other environmental indicators such as air pollution or noise intrusion requires information about the small-scale location of households relative to fixed and mobile emission sources. Modelling social indicators requires information on the spatial distribution of socio-economic and ethnic groups at the neighbourhood scale. One option to overcome the mismatch between the required spatial framework and existing data and models is to maintain the zonal organisation of the urban model and to add a disaggregate raster-based representation of space for specific modules, for instance for the calculation of local environmental impacts of land use and transport policies.

Work has been done in recent transnational projects for the European Commission (SPARTACUS - System for Planning and Research in Towns and Cities for Urban sustainability; PROPOLIS - Planning and Research of Policies for Land Use and Transport for Increasing Urban Sustainability) to develop such modules. They complement existing land-use transport models by spatially disaggregate environmental and social components. The so-called Raster Module is a GIS-based method which uses zonal and link-based outputs from urban models, disaggregates it, applies grid-based analytical and air dispersion and noise intrusion models and aggregates the results to indicators relevant for sustainability. The generated indicators comprise air pollution, land coverage, fragmentation and quality of open space, the exposure of different socio-economic groups to different air pollutants from urban transport and traffic noise and accessibility to open space.

In the paper current work towards disaggregate land-use transport environment models will be reported. First, a new analytical framework of land use transport environment models will be introduced. Second, the disaggregate Raster Module and its linkages to existing land use transport models will be presented. Then, results produced with the disaggregate module will be reported for several European sample cities in terms of indicators for urban sustainability. Finally, further research needs will be outlined.

[Home]    [Sitemap]