Micro-scale Simulation of the Macro Urban Form: Opportunities for Exploring Urban Change and Adaptation

Agent based models (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) micro-scale modeling have found abundant application in the area of urban land use and transport planning. These platforms enable a rich spatial representation of residential behavior. We present an urban ABM that deliberately emphasizes a sparse set of rules that influence agents' settlement decisions which interact with detailed spatial data on the geography and climate of a city region. Preliminary results are compared with historical data (1851 to 2001) of the urban growth of the City of Melbourne, the major urbanized area of the State of Victoria, Australia. We discuss potential extensions to the model and its value as an exploratory device for different transport and climate change scenarios.