Simulating urban land-use change based on the multi-hierarchal planning-environment interaction process

Urban land-use change is the result of coupling interaction between planning and environment systems. The aim of our study was to construct an effective model to show how the urban land-use changes under the planning-environment interaction system with multi-hierarchy and major function oriented zoning. Combining the Cellular automata (CA) model with logistic regression model, the proposed multi-hierarchal vector CA model (MH-VCA3) was constructed by mining multi-hierarchal land-use transition rules under the planning-environment interaction system. Taking Jiangyin City (China) as an example, we compared the simulated result of the proposed model to those of the well-accepted Logistic CA and traditional multi-level CA models to demonstrate the effectiveness of the consideration of top-down decomposition constraint and bottom-up updating. Furthermore, by simulating the land-use changes under different population regionalization scenarios, we found that in order to form the spatial pattern of "agglomeration in the north and ecology in the south, " the planned population growth at the global hierarchal level should be allocated to the district units according to the law of Central district > Chengxi district > Chengdong district > Chengnan district > Chengdongnan district. The proposed model is expected to provide scientific support for the formulation of urban planning schemes in the future.