Abstract
Urban sprawl is shaped by various geographical, ecological and social factors under the influence of land market forces. When modeling this process, geographers and economists tend to prioritize factors most relevant to their own domain. Still, there are very few structured systematic comparisons exploring how the extent of process representation affects the models’ ability to generate extent and pattern of change. This chapter aims to explore the question of how the degree of representation of land market processes affects simulated spatial outcomes. We identify four distinct elements of land markets: resource constraints, competitive bidding, strategic behavior, and endogenous supply decisions. Many land-use-change models include one or more of these elements; thus, the progression that we designed should facilitate analysis of our results in relation to a broad range of existing land-use-change models, from purely geographic to purely economic and from reduced form to highly structural models. The description of the new agent-based model, in which each of the four levels of market representation can be gradually activated, is presented. The behavior of suppliers and acquirers of land, and the agents’ interactions at land exchange are discussed in the presence of each of the four land-market mechanisms.
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Notes
- 1.
We debated whether or not to make parcel availability stochastic, with the probability of parcel supply being higher for parcels closer to the city center. We may explore the effects of these alternative algorithms in future work.
- 2.
In later versions of the Level 3 model, the WTA could also be a function of additional resource constraints (credit and debt constraints) and of expected sales price.
- 3.
Later versions of the models will have much more sophisticated definitions of open space amenities based on land management as well as land use.
- 4.
Note that this hypothesis could break down if buyers had sophisticated expectations regarding future paths of development. However, in a complex environment, even the most intelligent boundedly rational agent would likely fail to anticipate exact future patterns of local development. Modeling of such expectations, in any case, will be an interesting topic for future work.
- 5.
Analytical non-spatial models that account for the behavior of all three categories in a land market exist (Kraus 2006). However, within each group (developers, agricultural land owners and households) all agents are assumed to be homogeneous, perfectly rational and, with constant returns to scale. Space is assumed to be homogeneous except for the distance to the center, and enters economic models as travel costs and amount of spatial good acquired (sq foot). Location specifics and neighborhood externalities remain unexplored.
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Acknowledgements
Funding from NWO-ALW(LOICZ-NL) Project No. 014.27.012 and the U.S. National Science Grants No. 041406, 813799, and 0119804 is gratefully acknowledged.
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Parker, D.C., Brown, D.G., Filatova, T., Riolo, R., Robinson, D.T., Sun, S. (2012). Do Land Markets Matter? A Modeling Ontology and Experimental Design to Test the Effects of Land Markets for an Agent-Based Model of Ex-Urban Residential Land-Use Change. In: Heppenstall, A., Crooks, A., See, L., Batty, M. (eds) Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8927-4_26
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