Urban Economics Model for Land-Use Planning

Abstract

This chapter introduces our newly developed Spatially explicit Urban Land-use Model (SULM) as a tool for resilient urban planning. The SULM can create land-use and social economic scenarios at micro districts level based on an urban economic theory. In order to co-design transformative urban plans with local stake holders, it is important to visualize possible future land-use scenarios. This model makes it possible to endogenously project the residential choice of households, floor space and land area with considering location-specific disaster risk as well as economic and environmental factors. With this model, we can create scenarios for not only urban growth, but also urban shrinking, thus the method could be useful for both developing and developed countries’ situations. In this study, the model was developed and calibrated for the Tokyo Metropolitan Area (Greater Tokyo) at the micro-district level (around 1 km grid) and used to simulate possible land-use scenarios with different urban forms. We have specifically looked at the implications for climate change mitigation and adaptation capacities. This chapter explains mainly the tested three land-use scenarios; (1) Business as usual scenario, (2) Extreme urban compact city scenario, and (3) Combined mitigation and adaptation scenario. The scenarios were assessed with multiple criteria including disaster/energy resilience and environmental sustainability (CO2 emissions, urban climate) and economic benefits. The obtained results have shown that fairly large future economic costs could be saved by additionally considering adaptation (flood risk) in combination with mitigation (CO2 emissions) in the scenario that we call “Wise Shrinking”. Our research suggests that integration of resilience thinking into urban planning is important and promising.