City delineation in European applications of LUTI models: review and tests

ABSTRACT

This paper stresses the lack of attention paid to the geographical definitions of cities in LUTI models as one key detrimental aspect to transferring and generalising LUTI results. First, the argumentation develops from a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed publications about LUTI applications in European cities. We show that most authors do not assess findings against potential geographical biases. Second, theoretical simulations are conducted with UrbanSim applied to a synthetic urban area. By varying the geographical limits of the system and population endowments, our simulations confirm that the absence of control on city delineation weakens the results. Finally, the paper suggests methodological guidelines to improve the comparability of LUTI applications and push forward their theoretical agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• LUTI models
• Europe
• city delineation
• urbansim
• theoretical simulation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the funding agencies that made this research possible. We also thank two anonymous referees for their useful comments on a previous version of this work, as well as Kerry Schiel (University of Luxembourg) for proof reading the manuscript. Isabelle Thomas is grateful to LISER for the having offered the opportunity of a research stay, during which this work was initiated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Geoffrey Caruso http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9538-2328

Notes

1 We use the zone-version of the UrbanSim model. For consistency purpose, the cells of the grid will be referred to as “zones”.

2 Since all zones have the same size, absolute numbers are equivalent to densities.

3 Note that some noise appears in the estimates of commuting times, since MATsim uses only 25% of the agents (the maximum compatible with the computer power required, which is still larger than the 10% recommended by Nicolai & Nagel, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This study is both part of the MOEBIUS 2010–2014 research project (MObilities, Environment, Behaviours, Integrated in Urban Simulation) co-funded by the National Research Fund of Luxembourg (FNR CO09/SR/07) and the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research (LISER), and of the SUSTAINCITY 2010-2013 research project (Micro-simulation for the prospective of sustainable cities in Europe) funded by the European Union (FP7-SSH 244557).