Geosimulation of urban growth and demographic decline in the Ruhr: a case study for 2025 using the artificial intelligence of cells and agents

The Ruhr is an “old acquaintance” in the discourse of urban decline in old industrialized cities. The agglomeration has to struggle with archetypical problems of former monofunctional manufacturing cities. Surprisingly, the image of a shrinking city has to be refuted if you shift the focus from socioeconomic wealth to its morphological extension. Thus, it is the objective of this study to meet the challenge of modeling urban sprawl and demographic decline by combining two artificial intelligent solutions: The popular urban cellular automaton SLEUTH simulates urban growth using four simple but effective growth rules. In order to improve its performance, SLEUTH has been modified among others by combining it with a robust probability map based on support vector machines. Additionally, a complex multi-agent system is developed to simulate residential mobility in a shrinking city agglomeration: residential mobility and the housing market of shrinking city systems focuses on the dynamic of interregional housing markets implying the development of potential dwelling areas. The multi-agent system comprises the simulation of population patterns, housing prices, and housing demand in shrinking city agglomerations. Both models are calibrated and validated regarding their localization and quantification performance. Subsequently, the urban landscape configuration and composition of the Ruhr 2025 are simulated. A simple spatial join is used to combine the results serving as valuable inputs for future regional planning in the context of multifarious demographic change and preceding urban growth.