| An urban growth model is conceptualized as a metropolitan change model consisting of multiple scales: global, regional and local. The baseline model operates in a free trade environment, in a space initially without consideration of the regulatory and redistributive forces of national and state governmental levels. Space in this study is abstracted as a metropolitan envelope, which is defined to start at the beginning of the twentieth century with the emergence of the New York, London and Tokyo metropolitan systems, and expanded one hundred years later into a system of four hundred major central cities and their associated commuter hinterlands. The expectation is that this system will continue to expand in the twenty-first century, as the primary engine of global economic diffusion and development. The purpose of this research is to model economic spatial interactions that generate investment flows that in turn convert into economic activity after the construction and placement of private and public infrastructure. The global model provides a set of allocated investment flows to regions, and the regional model provides employment and residential allocations to the local model, which displays land use changes. One major goal is to test the systems ability (or not) to achieve partial convergence of per capita incomes across the set of metropolitan spaces over multiple scales. For a variety of tested scenarios, temporal convergence and rank-size rule metrics can be evaluated at multiple spatial scales. |
