Clarke This Urban Research Initiative (URI) project will develop an integrated modeling environment (IME) for the cross-disciplinary study of a wide range of questions pertaining to urban change. At the core of IME is a model of evolving urban spatial structure already successfully applied to the Baltimore/Washington and San Francisco metropolitan areas. This research drastically extends the capabilities of the previous model by allowing it to be combined with a variety of other models of natural and social processes affecting the urban realm, by strengthening its theoretical and technical base and analytical utility, and by integrating it within a portable user-friendly environment for the investigation of a variety of urban research and policy questions.
IME consists of two levels. At the IME-1 level the focus is on the changing urban spatial structure, as in the earlier model, but now a much more versatile and sophisticated range of urban growth models can be built through the linkage with models of other natural and human urban subsystems. The IME-2 level is for investigating more general, not directly geographic urban research and policy questions, where urban spatial structure is one of several key factors. The research plan consists of four interrelated tasks. Task One develops the theoretical and technical framework for the IME. Task Two demonstrates and tests the validity of the approach at the IME-1 level through modeling and analyzing the growth patterns of selected metropolitan regions. Task Three demonstrates and tests the validity of the approach at the IME-2 level with a study seeking to predict land use intensity and population distribution through coupling of several different models of physical and human processes, including a model of urban spatial structure. Task Four focuses on the computational implementation and dissemination of the IME. Dissemination plans include the development of two (one undergraduate and one graduate) Web-based courses on urban change. ***
The project is multi-institutional, linking together the University of California Santa Barbara and two other major federally funded projects: the Urban Retrospectives/Urban Dynamics initiative at the United States Geological Survey will provide the data for the metropolitan areas and assist with the more routine modeling work. The Urban Security initiative at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will contribute advanced expertise on the theoretical and technical aspects of complex dynamic models, and on the coupling of physical science models with urban models. It will also provide access to supercomputing resources where needed.
