Urban shrinkage: a vicious circle for residents and infrastructure? - Coupling agent-based models on residential location choice and urban infrastructure development

One of the challenges of simulating urban regions in Europe is urban shrinkage, where de-industrialisation, massive population losses and ageing cause housing vacancies in cities. These vacancies decrease efficiency in urban infrastructure and result in problems related to under-utilisation. Investigating the relationship between residential location choice and infrastructure-related decisions can foster urban planning related to shrinkage. This paper presents a coupled simulation of two agent-based models: a) Resident agents belong to different household types. They decide upon their location and move to existing flats or houses. For this, they consider aspects such as their preference for certain urban structural types and urban infrastructure. b) Infrastructure agents represent providers of roads, public transport and schools, as these infrastructure types are likely to influence residential choice. Infrastructure agents change urban land use by altering infrastructure. They take into account the efficiency of the infrastructure. The simulation focuses on the mutual interactions between residents and infrastructure. The main exchanges of information relate to spatially explicit distribution of population and of infrastructure. The decisions of one agent rely upon the output of the other and vice versa. It will be investigated which circumstances lead to a scattered shrinkage all over the city and which ones stimulate a decline of single urban districts.