Urban Expansion Simulation Coupled with Residential Location Selection and Land Acquisition Bargaining: A Case Study of Wuhan Urban Development Zone, Central China’s Hubei Province

The urban expansion process involves multiple stakeholders whose interactions and decision-making behaviors have a complex impact on urban land conversion. In this study, we established an urban expansion simulation model that couples two sub-models: the residential location selection model and the land acquisition bargaining model. Those sub-models include four types of agents: resident agent (RA), real estate developer agent (DA), government agent (GA), and farmer agent (FA). The residential location selection model is composed of three agents, RA, DA, and GA, and is first used to select residential locations, while an artificial neural network (ANN) is used to define the behavior rules of RA and RA selects pixels as candidate locations according to the joint decision probability. Then the land acquisition bargaining model is used, which is composed of GA and FA. If the land acquisition is successful, a pixel is converted into urban land, which is occupied by the corresponding RA; otherwise, the RA selects the next pixel and enters the bargaining process again, and so on, until the RA successfully selects a residential location. Each iteration represents the selection process of an agent. We used this model to simulate urban expansion within the Wuhan Urban Development Zone (WHUDZ) of central China from 2009 to 2019. The overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of the simulation results were 92.78% and 55.24%, respectively, which were higher than the results using logistic regression cellular automata. Moreover, we obtained the relative contributions of various influencing factors in the ANN on the residential location selection, revealing the influence of the land acquisition process on land expansion. In addition, the coupled model predicted that the WHUDZ’s urban land area will reach 1415.82 km2 in 2029, mainly through extensional expansion, and the southeast and northwest will be expansion hot spots.