Unravelling the urban dynamics of port cities using cellular-automata-based land use and transport interaction model

Abstract

Port cities hold an important role in economic development both in the global and local contexts. Urban ports and their host city may form mutualistic symbiosis as ports generate economic activity while cities enable agglomeration of commodities and labours. However, some tensions may form between the two entities as ports exert a considerable amount of negative externalities in the form of congestion and pollution, and urban development can limit the space available for ports. The urban environment itself is a complex system characterised by self-organisation, where interactions of agents at the local scale result in the emergence of patterns at larger scales. In port cities, the system is further complicated by the interactions between port and urban developments. Due to these intricate relationships, there have been a substantial amount of port city studies from various academic points of view. A review of these studies showed that most port city studies are based on a limited number of specific cases. This is unfortunate, as generalised insights into the individual interactions of urban agents are critical in successful transport and land use planning of port cities as these would allow planners to better predict the long-term outcomes of their plans. There is, therefore, a need to integrate more historical approaches and simulation modelling techniques into port city studies to test the broader applicability of previous case-specific port city studies. Therefore, this research seeks to address this research need by gaining an understanding of the interactions between urban transport, port development, and urban development in port cities through simulation modelling approach that can facilitate examination of urban dynamics in a wide range of port cities. To achieve this, this thesis is divided into three main parts and an additional fourth one. The first part of this thesis seeks to develop a framework for examining port cities by critically assessing the port city concept within the academic literature. This culminates in the formation of a two-tiered taxonomy system, built on existing spatial and functional port city frameworks, as a port city examination framework. The second part develops a modelling framework suitable for simulating port and urban dynamics. This is done through a land use and transport interaction (LUTI) model based on cellular automata (CA). This modelling framework demonstrates the advantage of using hexagonal cells over square cells, which is the first academic work in urban CA modelling to do so. The third part addresses the quantification of urban interactions in port cities by describing the methodology and results of model calibration to generate insights on the interactions within 46 port and 10 non-port settlements in Great Britain. These three parts contribute to a better understanding of urban dynamics in port cities. Further, the final part uses the simulation model to put together these interactions to examine the evolution of both hypothetical and actual port cities. This thesis makes several important contributions to the body of knowledge on port cities. The two-tiered taxonomy system contributes to the conceptual view of port cities by encouraging a more comprehensive and unbiased framework. The second part of this thesis contributes an improvement in the urban modelling methodology. The third part extends what is currently known about urban and port interactions in port cities by both operationalising theoretical interactions into a set of calibrated variables and generalising insights from a large number of port cities. By doing so, this thesis paves the way for future studies to examine the evolution of port-city systems, which is demonstrated in the fourth and final part.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Aditya Tafta Nugraha: orcid.org/0000-0002-4754-4713

ORCID for Benedict Waterson: orcid.org/0000-0001-9817-7119

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