Towards Rural Resilience: Assessing Future Spatial Urban Expansion and Population Growth in Quito as a Measure of Resilience

Abstract

The urban and rural areas of the Metropolitan District of Quito (DMQ) have experienced an aggressive urbanization process in the last two decades, which in many cases has changed the most appropriate land use as determined by the local government. This problem is exacerbated by poor land use planning in a city that is growing in an uncontrolled and disorderly manner toward rural areas, as well as by the accelerated growth of rural localities. This article contributes and analyzes: (1) the geographic projections of the next 50 years for urban settlements and buildings in the rural areas of the DMQ using geographic artificial intelligence techniques (cellular automata); (2) a composite index of resilience (CIR) is constructed for each rural parish of the DMQ, adapted to the characteristics and conditions of the territory for which five dimensions with equal weights, the ecological footprint, and the size of each parish were considered; finally, (3) the change in CIR is determined based on the projections of spatial urban expansion and population growth for the next 50 years. According to the results, urbanization definitely has a negative impact on CIR, although it was found that in parishes with declining population growth CIR increases.