Cellular-Automata-Based Simulation of the Settlement Development in Vienna

The motivation to deal with the topic simulation of the settlement development in a city in the past 120 years has been to acquire general methods for the analysis and simulation of settlement development processes on the one hand and to verify these methods on the example of the real development of the city of Vienna on the other hand. We follow the assumption that the underlying processes of the urban development can be reduced to various pronounced but always the same hidden driving forces. The objective is to validate the simulation model by the real settlement development and to provide a solid base for the simulation of possible development scenarios of the city of Vienna. The basis for the validation are digital cellular processed and statistical analysed data of the development of the technical infrastructure, the public transportation systems and the population density in Vienna between 1888 and 2001. The simulation method is based on the technique of Cellular Automata (CA) that permits the simulation of the interaction between a potential field and the development of individual areas. This modelling technique is well known as “reaction diffusion” or “dialectic breakdown”. The CA serves as representation of the examined space and divides this space into individual cells. Each of these cells can save certain information (population density, infrastructure facility, development quality) and exchange them locally with the neighbouring cells. The used model parameters permit the simulation of different spread patterns und spread speeds of a settlement structure. From the results methodological, structural, spatial and temporal regularities of urban development processes are derived