Modeling urban growth with SLEUTH - A case study of Urumqi, Xinjiang, China

The city is a typical dynamic spatial complex system. It exhibits several signature characteristics of complexity, including fractal dimensionality and self-similarity across scales, self-organization, and emergence. The cellular automation is an important method for researching complex system. It already has been widely applied to research complex geographic process. This paper summarizes the domestic and foreign present situation of research of the CA model applied to the city space dynamic simulation and introduces a kind of loosing coupling cellular automaton model of city-SLEUTH. SLEUTH is the evolutionary product of the Clarke Urban Growth Model that uses cellular automata. It has been successfully implemented in some cities of Europe and America. The authors use the SLEUTH to model the future (2001-2020 year) spatial dynamic evolutionary process in the western Urumqi city. The result indicates that SLEUTH can carry on the effective simulation of the city's growth and, sprawl. The result has the certain value of theory and practice for planning of Urumqi city