Modeling Urban Growth in the Fairfax area: Cellular Automata Approach

Keywords: Fairfax, Land Use and Land Cover Change, Urban Systems, GIS
Session Type: Virtual Poster
Day: Wednesday
Session Start / End Time: 4/7/2021 01:30 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/7/2021 02:45 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 52

Abstract

Land use and land cover change would impact the global ecosystem and the quality of human wellbeing. Rapid population growth and economic development drive the urbanization progress at a higher rate for many metropolitan areas. The County of Fairfax and the City of Fairfax are located on the Northern Virginia. As a suburban area on the west side of Washington D.C. metropolitan, this region has more than one million population with almost top median household income among the U.S.. With the continuously development, the land resources are consumed a lot during past decades. For current stage, the urbanized area has already reached a very high level which means further land development should be more prudent. Based on land rent theory, the highly potential develop area would adjacent to current urban area, also multicenter and mix-use planning strategies help to shape our cities. Here we try to use micro level simulation methods to test the urban development scenarios. The SLEUTH model, a cellular automata (CA) model developed by Keith Clarke, has been widely used to simulate land use change by considering the different growth patterns like edge development and new spreading center growth. In this work, we predict the Fairfax urban growth base on the CA model which could help people to better understand the land use dynamics and the land resources conservation.