Actors and factors in land-use simulation: The challenge of urban shrinkage

Both modelers and social scientists attempt to find better explanations of complex urban systems. They include development paths, underlying driving forces and their expected impacts. So far, land-use research has predominantly focused on urban growth. However, new challenges have arisen since urban shrinkage entered the research agenda of the social and land-use sciences. Therefore, the focus of this paper is a twofold one: Using the example of urban shrinkage, we first discuss the capacity of existing land-use modeling approaches to integrate new social science knowledge in terms of land-use, demography and governance because social science models are indispensable for accurately explaining the processes behind shrinkage. Second, we discuss the combination of system dynamics (SD), cellular automata (CA) and agent-based model (ABM) approaches to cover the main characteristics, processes and patterns of urban shrinkage. Using Leipzig, Germany, as a case study, we provide the initial results of a joint SD-CA model and an ABM that both operationalize social science knowledge regarding urban shrinkage. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.