| Abstract | We present and evaluate a foundational agent-based model of land use change at therural-urban fringe within the context of a larger project that will link to surveys of
the environmental and community preferences of residents with historical data on
patterns of development. In this paper, we focus on the dynamics arising from a
model of residential location resulting from preferences for services, density, and
aesthetics focusing on the relationship between micro level preferences and policy
relevant macro phenomena such as scattered development, largest city size, and the
number of residential clusters. We consider two representations of agents’ utility
functions – one additively separable and one multiplicative – to see if functional form
has any impact on the dynamics of the system, and find that they produce similar
results. Our analysis includes both representative agent runs, in which all agents have
identical preferences, as well as runs in which the agents have diverse preferences. We
find that diversity can increase sprawl through feedbacks associated with the spatial
locations of services and agents. In addition, we examine cases in which the agents’
location decisions affect the aesthetic quality of neighboring sites and find that these
feedbacks further exacerbate the sprawl effect.
|
