Exploring Drivers of Urban Expansion

Spatial patterns in urban land development are linked with the level and type of economic activity. Here, we develop a statistical model to explore the relationship between the spatially explicit population density and the type of land use in a region. The relationship between the type of land use (urban/non-urban) and the level of economic activity is modeled at the scale of a single cell on the geographical map. Thus, the statistical model should be tested against large samples of data points on the high-resolution maps. The challenge here is that the original socio-economic data is given at a coarser resolution than the land use (200×200 m cells) We present results of our spatial modeling exercise for the case study of the Seville Province, Spain.