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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Modelling urbanization to simulate prospective scenarios : a comparative approach

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International audience; In France, managing urban growth and sprawl depends on the housing policies made by municipalities (or groups of municipalities), by the Department, the Region or the State (i.e. by public actors) through specific statutory documents like PLU (Plan locaux d'urbanisme) or SCOT (Schémas de cohérence territoriaux). Currently, the policies leading to such documents appear very crucial. Indeed, sustainability in urban development has become a crucial issue. To manage it, urban planners use a variety of prescriptive tools such as Geographic information systems (SIG) or Computer aided drafting (CAD) softwares. Nevertheless, these "traditional" tools have a reduced predictive capability and since about 20 years, researchers try to develop modeling approaches allowing to improve describing and forecasting urban growth and its consequences. The aim of this paper is to present and compare three of these modeling tools, relaying on different theories. The heterogeneity of the produced results is discussed in the conclusion and envisaged as a interesting contribution to feed debates about urban growth management in the current framework of territorial intelligence.