A Coupled CA Urban Development Model (UDM) and Urban Fabric Generator (UFG) for the Assessment of Climate Hazards on Future Urban Development

Abstract

Cellular Automata (CA) spatial models have become a de facto means by which to simulate future scenarios of land use activity, particularly urban development. Increasingly, such models are being employed within large scale climate impact, adaption and resilience studies to provide future scenarios of land use change and urban development, facilitating the calculation of the economic impact of future climate hazards and development land use adaption options. However, many spatial CA models only provide information on whether land has undergone a transition from one use/activity to a new one. In the case of urban development, they are unable to provide information on the spatial pattern of new development at an intra-cell level of spatial fidelity. However, in many cases such information is important as the spatial impacts of hazards and the adaption and resilience of new urban development will be dependent on the precise spatial configuration of buildings, roads and urban green space. In this paper an Urban Fabric Generator (UFG) is presented that takes the outputs of an Urban Development Model (UDM) and simulates plausible spatial configurations of buildings, roads and urban green space. The utility of the UFG is demonstrated via two flooding case studies, where generated spatial patterns of urban form are used to parameterise a hydrodynamic pluvial flood model that evaluates the impact of future climate driven rainfall on property damage and the utility of infrastructure investment with regards to improving surface water flood resilience.