| As the world's urban landscapes rapidly increase in size, valuable natural resources and open spaces are being diminished. Currently, researchers are developing new techniques for accurately predicting where and how urban landscapes are going to grow in order to manage for the associated problems. This research examines one of these new techniques for predicting urban growth, that of cellular automaton (CA) simulation modeling. Specifically, this research describes an attempt at replicating the results of the Clarke Urban Growth Model (UGM) in an attempt to verify that the model can be a useful tool in the prediction and management of urban growth. A test simulation was created in the Swarm simulation software and was used to implement the urban growth cellular transitions rules that are the fundamental drivers of the Clarke UGM. A comparison of urban growth predictions for the Philadelphia/Wilmington metropolitan region from both the Swarm test model and the Clarke UGM has shown that, in fact, both models predicted statistically similar urban growth trends for the study area. |
