Regional Study

RESIDENTIAL LAND USE AND POPULATION DENSITY PROJECTIONS

This web site contains data and software that allows the user to examine one possible land use development pattern for the year 2020. The purpose is to provide a visualization of generalized residential urban expansion in the region based on a very simple set of assumptions about where growth will occur. Actual land use change is dependent on a wide variety of interacting factors, making land use change very difficult to predict. This projection scenario is intended only to provide the casual user with an appreciation for how the region may change by the year 2020, given current understanding of population changes, some basic assumptions about where growth pressures are most likely to occur, and local land use zoning policy.[1]

This web site demonstrates a modeled build-out scenario for the seven-county Cleveland-Akron-Lorain areas in Northeast Ohio. 

[1] This projection, using a limited set of data and a rather simple model and methodology, should not be construed a definitive land use projection. Again, the purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate some basic concepts about urban residential land use expansion using the power of map visualization provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. See Lee, Klosterman, Salling, and Kulikowski for a review of the literature on urban growth modeling.