Abstract
Urban growth and land use change models, supported by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and increased digital data availability, have the potential to become important tools for monitoring and guiding urban spatial planning and development. Five broad categories of urban models are utilised internationally, that is, land use transportation models, cellular automata, system dynamics, agent-based models and spatial economics/econometric models. This paper provides a broad overview of South African modelling projects that monitor or simulate urban spatial change. The review identified a variety of government and academic urban modelling initiatives. These initiatives mostly track trends, rather than simulating future scenarios, and analyse historical land cover change using GIS and remote sensing software. There is a risk within Gauteng, however, that out-dated data, different population projections, duplicated tools, limited spatial data infrastructure (SDI) and a lack of resources; could compromise urban spatial change modelling efforts within government institutions. As such, the paper discusses key challenges and opportunities for modelling urban spatial change, with specific reference to the Gauteng City-Region – the heartland of the South African economy and the Southern African region.
Highlights
In a world described as moving into the urban age, urban areas are becoming the dominant form of habitat for humankind, and the engine-rooms of human development as a whole (UNCHS, 2012)
Apart from the UrbanSim project and limited academic urban simulation research, it can be argued that advanced modelling of urban spatial change within South Africa at an institutional level has not reached a high degree of sophistication
We argue that refining the various models that already exist for South Africa and the Gauteng City-Region (GCR) can serve as a starting point for informing long-term planning, rather than duplicating efforts
Summary
In a world described as moving into the urban age, urban areas are becoming the dominant form of habitat for humankind, and the engine-rooms of human development as a whole (UNCHS, 2012). The GPC’s flagship project is the Gauteng 2055 (or G2055) projecta long-term plan that sets out to ‘maximise the city-region’s potential and its value as a key economic driver for the country, through careful long-term planning aligned with the national vision and other strategic perspectives’ (GPC, 2012, 2). Such long-range development planning processes call for the need to understand more accurately the long-term prospects for urban change and the likely impact of different planning and infrastructure choices and investments on the future urban form through urban spatial change modelling. Section three discusses South African urban modelling initiatives, while section four discusses key modelling challenges and possible modelling opportunities that may benefit and inform long-range development planning processes in the GCR
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