Content area
Abstract
The world is experiencing unprecedented and rapid urbanization. To be able to handle this transformation and guide the design of these cities in the way the inhabitants want to have them, it is necessary to understand the drivers and perform planning beforehand.
Cities are complex systems. That means that one cannot modify an isolated part and expect a precise result from that change. It is therefore necessary to understand and model cities as holistic adaptive systems, where all parts interact and create sometimes unexpected results.
Transport system (streets, roads, and rail) planning and land-use planning ("urban planning") are often seen as separate processes, depending on different levels of political decisions, and performed by different professions. What this thesis show, with support from earlier research, is that these two planning processes interact and affect each other to a large extent. It is maybe intuitive that urban land use that attracts visitors, workers, or inhabitants requires access to a sufficient transport system. What is less well known is that new transport infrastructure, by creating new opportunities for access to previously undeveloped land, can induce urban growth.
Urban research has often treated cities as continuous areas. But the accessibility given by the transport system is far from uniform, it rather forms a network that allows interaction between different land areas. This idea of cities as networks of interacting places has shown to be fruitful to understand how the transportation network, places, and their interaction form cities and induce urban growth. This thesis argues that this network of places can be modeled and understood by using a proposed novel model that incorporates these peculiarities.
Finally, the thesis claims that this way of understanding and modeling urban growth is useful not only to explain the current situation but also to understand the historical development and to calculate potential trajectories of future growth.
