Forecasting Urban Vacancy Dynamics in a Shrinking City: A Land Transformation Model

Abstract

Abstract:In the past two centuries, many American urban areas have experienced significant expansion in both populating and depopulating cities. The pursuit of bigger, faster, and more growth-oriented planning parallels a situation where municipal decline has also been recognized as a global epidemic. In recent decades many older industrial cities have experienced significant depopulation, job loss, economic decline, and massive increases in vacant and abandoned properties due primarily to losses in industry and relocating populations. Despite continuous economic decline and depopulation, many of these so-called 'shrinking cities' still chase growth-oriented planning policies, due partially to inabilities to accurately predict future urban growth/decline patterns. This capability is critical to understanding land use alternation patterns and predicting future possible scenarios for the development of more proactive land use policies dealing with urban decline and regeneration. In this research, the city of Chicago, Illinois, USA is used as a case site to test an urban land use change model that predicts urban decline in a shrinking city, using vacant land as a proxy. Our approach employs the Land Transformation Model (LTM), which combines Geographic Information Systems and artificial neural networks to forecast land use change. Results indicate that the LTM is a good resource to simulate urban vacant land changes. Mobility and housing market conditions seem to be the primary variables contributing to decline.

The projected impacts of smart decline on urban runoff contamination levels

“…Newman et al (2016) utilized the land transformation model (LTM) to test the effectiveness of vacant land forecasting variables in vacant urban land prediction, paving the way to LULC modeling in shrinking cities. Lee and Newman (2017) then tested urban land use change model in Chicago, Illinois, USA, predicting future urban decline in the city. In 2018, Lee et al used the same methodology to make comparisons in vacant land amounts between growing and shrinking cities.…”

“…The CLUE-S model serves as a proven solution for simulating multiple land-use types simultaneously. This research advances the Lee and Newman (2017) model by more accurately predicting the vast array of multiple future land uses in shrinking cities rather than simply predicting for future vacant land only. It also couples these outputs with impact models to project effects on hazardous substance increase or decrease.…”

“…Using these factors, they successfully simulated changes in commercial, residential, industrial, green space, vacant, and other land uses in urban renewal areas of Hong Kong. To compensate the lack of driving factors for vacant land change in the model of Zheng et al, specific vacant land forecasting variables were derived from studies on forecasting urban vacancy dynamics in shrinking cities (Lee & Newman, 2017;Newman et al, 2016), including parcel size, population change, education rate, employment rate, minority rate, poverty rate, vacant unit rate, and distance to vacant land.…”

Predicting Detached Housing Vacancy: A Multilevel Analysis

“…As noted, shrinking cities have a much larger influence on the socioeconomic fabric of affected societies. Among these problems, the issue of vacant properties is especially critical to address [10]. If we recognize vacant properties as both the cause and result of a declining city, and accordingly identify and manage this cause-and-effect relationship, it may be possible to preemptively prevent the vicious cycle of vacant properties and deteriorating cities.…”

“…The literature has proposed various definitions of "vacant properties" and their contributing factors across different scales-from city-based macroscopic to neighborhoodand individual housing unit-based local scales. Vacant land is said to include not only underperforming or unoccupied properties, but also neglected or abandoned commercial/industrial buildings that may pose a threat to public safety [10,11]. Vacant land may also include open spaces such as parks, farm sites, and properties with natural resource value [6].…”