Urban Growth Modeling Based on a Game between Farmers and Governments: Case Study of Urban Fringe in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China

Abstract

Urban systems are complicated systems where land-use changes may significantly affect the environment and the ecosystem. Therefore, modeling urban growth is crucial for urban planners and administrators to support sustainable development. This paper provides a spatially disaggregated model for urban growth simulation that is characterized by the innovative idea that considers the behavior of residents and couples the explorations of the game between farmers and governments in the land development process. Three kinds of agents, namely, residents, farmers, and governments, make their decisions according to their land use–conversion preferences. Through the use of different strategies that are abstracted from actual land transactions in China, the payoffs to farmers and governments in the game of land expropriation are quantified and then the Nash equilibrium solution of the game is worked out. Those cells with mixed strategy Nash equilibrium solutions that include a probability of greater than 0.5 that either governments will expropriate land legally or that farmers will accept the land acquisition of the governments are referred to as “candidate regions for urban expansion.” Based on how they evaluate the “candidate region” condition according to the surrounding environment and land price, residents determine the final land-use transition of each cell in the candidate region that is formed in the previous step. Jiangxia, a suburban area in Wuhan, is used as a case study area to simulate the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban growth. The proposed model, which couples game theory and human decision making in the land-development process, can effectively represent and simulate the spatiotemporal dynamics and patterns of urban growth as well as explain the driving mechanism of urban expansion.