- The Study of Land Use Changes in the Tehran Metropolitan Area by Using MOLAND Model    1245 kb by    Yaghoubkhani, Morteza & Dadashpour, Hashem & Kheyroddin, Reza | m.yaghoobkhany@modares.ac.ir    Short Outline To simulate possible land use change scenarios for the year 2028, this research creates future urban growth scenarios, based on data and storylines from the Tehran metropolitan area. Iran and the scenarios are carried out using the MOLAND model. Abstract Increasingly, in urban areas land is too scarce a commodity to allow it to be taken up in unplanned growth. However, any action – or lack of it – to influence land use has significant consequences both for people, businesses, and organizations in the area, and, more generally, for the urban morphology itself. Forecasting the effectiveness as well as the indirect consequences of policies are two main focal points of planning studies. Modeling urban land use changes is helpful to understanding urban dynamics and can be used as an important tool for planners, capable of producing insights about the possible consequences of decisions made by them. Tehran Metropolitan Area include Tehran city and its surrounding urbanized areas, covers an area about 12000 km2 and approximately has a population of 14 million that about 7.8 million of this population lives in Tehran, experienced a rapid growth in population and an enormous spatial development. In this research, future urban growth scenarios created, based on data and storylines for the Tehran metropolitan area, Iran and the scenarios are carried out using the MOLAND model. The basic idea of MOLAND model is to simulate the land use scenario demands based on socio-economic data at first, and then allocate the land use scenario patterns at the local scale with the considerations of land use suitability, zoning, accessibility and neighborhood effect by using cellular automata (CA) model to satisfy the balance between land use scenario demands and supply. The results of modeling simulate possible land use change scenarios for year 2028 in the Tehran metropolitan area and shown urban growth arises from increase in population and migration due to socio-economic changes, but the spatial patterns of growth are different according to various planning policies. Keywords Land Use Change Modeling, Urban Growth Scenario, MOLAND Model, CA, Tehran Metropolitan Area Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper