Modeling urban growth by cellular automata

International audience; The structural development of human settlements can be characterized as a complex highly feedbacketed process. The assumption that this process is governed by rather few fundamental laws stimulated a considerable research in the field of urban growth during the last decade. Aiming at the comprehension of the basic underlying dynamics different approaches from the field of self-organizing systems have been proposed. In this paper we present a "cellular model" of urban growth dynamics based on the work of White, Engelen and Uljee. As a starting point this model throws some light on the mechanism of urban growth. But even more important, it raises a lot of questions con…