Abstract
The Urban Development Plan of the city of Ensenada, México (UDPE) states four major strategic projects, one of which mandates to “Acquire and enable new land reserves and expand opportunities for economic and social development.” This is of vital importance given the large number of vacant lots that perforates the urban surface in contrast to the physical limitations of growth demarcated by hill areas of a steep slope, which forces a sustainable use of the land. These are important growth challenges, affecting aspects such as the real estate market, in particular, that related to industrial activities, which has not matured due to outdated planning practice, resulting in industrial sprawl. This paper shows an institutional effort to analyze the UDPE from a Complex Systems approach with an Agent-Based Model, adapting Peter Allen’s concept of Structural Attractor. This attraction results from an agglomeration of UDPE’s regulatory attributes and real estate investor’s land-acquisition criteria that affects the spatial behavior of vacant land that is attractive for industrial activity. Unlike physical land uses, these attractive zones emerge, grow, move, diminish, and emerge again over time in the form of Attractive Land Footprints. Understanding these phenomena is vital for local policymakers. The findings indicate that the current Urban Plan is ill-suited regarding current industry development expectations. The model also showed unexpected roles played by population density, road network, and residential land use in Attractive Land Footprint dynamics, acting as a thought-provoking process for policymakers and real estate investors, as it helped them to understand Ensenada’s industry phenomena.
Highlights
A current characteristic of the city of Ensenada (The city of Ensenada is located in Mexico at the coordinates 31°510 2800 N 116°360 2100 W), México that has concerned both its municipal authorities and investors is the challenge of promoting and harmoniously integrating industrial activities into the urban land in the face of untapped opportunities and challenges that have gotten worse over time
In a recent project called Sectoral Programme of Industrial Development of Ensenada [1] it is estimated that 48% of the industry is in normative incompatibility with the Urban Development Plan of Ensenada (UDPE) [2], 87% of the properties that host this activity are in lots less than one hectare contrary to the recommendation of 10 hectares [3] and 59% of this activity is on lower hierarchy
We presented the methodology, where we introduced the concept of Attractive Land Footprint and the computational modeling process (We simulated Ensenada City Attractive Land Footprint by using a spatial model of cellular automata developed in the NetLogo programming environment)
Summary
A current characteristic of the city of Ensenada (The city of Ensenada is located in Mexico at the coordinates 31°510 2800 N 116°360 2100 W), México that has concerned both its municipal authorities and investors is the challenge of promoting and harmoniously integrating industrial activities into the urban land in the face of untapped opportunities and challenges that have gotten worse over time. Among these are industrial sprawl due to a lack of industrial land-use policy implementation and at the same time, an abundance of vacant lots that currently represent 10% of the urban surface. Having new planning approaches and public policies focused on efficient use of the finite urban land resources are crucial
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