A Planning Tool for Simulating Urban Growth Process and Spatial Strategy of Urban Development in Chuandong, China

This century is marked by rapid urbanization. Some statistics predict that the world’s urban population will reach five billion by 2030 (United Nations 2007). This rapid urbanization not only has resulted in expanded land-use, but also has led to population increases in urban areas and development-related environmental impacts. Researchers, therefore, have begun to be concerned about the relationships between urbanization, population dynamics, and development-related environmental impacts (Lambin and Geist 2001; Fontaine and Rounsevell 2009). In this chapter, we introduce a simulation tool, spatial strategic plan support system (SSP-SS), to support local decision-making of urban development, which includes two separate parts for urban growth simulation and total amount of household energy consumption and waste discharge. To represent the process of urban growth, the constraint cellular automata (CA) approach is utilized, and an agent-based model is employed for calculating the total amount of household energy consumption and waste discharge. Nowadays, urbanization is taking place at an unprecedented pace in China, and it will continue over the next decades. According to some statistics, the total migration into urban areas during 1995–2000 amounted to 128 million and the amount of