LUXE is a land-use change model featuring different levels of land market implementation. It integrates utility measures, budget constraints, competitive bidding, and market interactions to model land-use change in exurban environment.

While the world’s total urban population continues to grow, this growth is not equal. Some cities are declining, resulting in urban shrinkage which is now a global phenomenon. Many problems emerge due to urban shrinkage including population loss, economic depression, vacant properties and the contraction of housing markets. To explore this issue, this paper presents an agent-based model stylized on spatially explicit data of Detroit Tri-county area, an area witnessing urban shrinkage. Specifically, the model examines how micro-level housing trades impact urban shrinkage by capturing interactions between sellers and buyers within different sub-housing markets. The stylized model results highlight not only how we can simulate housing transactions but the aggregate market conditions relating to urban shrinkage (i.e., the contraction of housing markets). To this end, the paper demonstrates the potential of simulation to explore urban shrinkage and potentially offers a means to test polices to alleviate this issue.

RHEA aims to provide a methodological platform to simulate the aggregated impact of households’ residential location choice and dynamic risk perceptions in response to flooding on urban land markets. It integrates adaptive behaviour into the spatial landscape using behavioural theories and empirical data sources. The platform can be used to assess: how changes in households’ preferences or risk perceptions capitalize in property values, how price dynamics in the housing market affect spatial demographics in hazard-prone urban areas, how structural non-marginal shifts in land markets emerge from the bottom up, and how economic land use systems react to climate change. RHEA allows direct modelling of interactions of many heterogeneous agents in a land market over a heterogeneous spatial landscape. As other ABMs of markets it helps to understand how aggregated patterns and economic indices result from many individual interactions of economic agents.
The model could be used by scientists to explore the impact of climate change and increased flood risk on urban resilience, and the effect of various behavioural assumptions on the choices that people make in response to flood risk. It can be used by policy-makers to explore the aggregated impact of climate adaptation policies aimed at minimizing flood damages and the social costs of flood risk.

This is a coupled conceptual model of agricultural land decision-making and incentivisation and species metacommunities.