Sustainable Urban Land Use Allocation With Spatial Optimization

Sustainable urban form has been recognized as one of the major concerns of the planning practice. Current land use pattern trends with low-density, single-use, and leapfroging urban growth on city outskirts call for more efficient land use development strategies balancing economy, environmental protection, and social equity. In this paper, we present a new multiobjective spatial optimization model, which minimizes the conflicting objectives of open space development, infill and redevelopment, land use neighborhood compatibility, and cost distance to already urbanized areas. Land use allocation is restrained by a density-based design constraint. Based on a hypothetical problem of 400 raster cells, we generate multiple exact compromise solutions with varying importance of allocation objectives. We discuss further model refinements and propose evaluating the prescribed patterns with multi agent geosimulation.