Dr. Steve Carver
Dr. Stuart Barr
1st October 1999 - 30th September 2003
Commonwealth Scholarship
Urban land use is dynamic phenomenon, changing with space and time. Detailed planning is essential to ensure new development does not produce negative impacts to the society, economy, and environment. Urban growth primarily occurs by filling in of vacant land, urban extension into open land, or renewal which may result in the absorption of growth as part of the process of revitalising deteriorated areas (Chapin and Kaiser, 1979). Urban land use planning is complex and futureoriented. Monitoring land use development at local and national scale is very important to ensure that effective planning can be done to allocate scare land resource to suitable used. In order to manage land efficiently, tool and method to monitor and manage land resource have to be developed. In addition to that, planners and decision-makers have to increase public participation in planning since the public would be the users of certain development.
The study attempts to allocate residential land use development using GIS. Cellular automata model would be integrated with GIS in simulating urban growth and predict new residential development. Then the model would determine number of houses to be built on developable sites. The model would be tested in selected study area to see the impact of certain development to the communities.