Dawn Cassandra Parker

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · School of Planning

Over the past decade, Waterloo Region has experienced significant population growth and a resulting wave of housing construction, but house prices and rents have continued to rise. To tackle the broader housing crisis affecting Ontario and Canada, calls for increased housing construction have grown, but advocates often emphasize quantities of homes...

Renewed interest in light-rail transit (LRT) in North America has heightened the need for an improved understanding of transit impacts on land value uplift (LVU). A number of studies have investigated the relationship, with findings varying with local contexts and estimation methods. Most of these studies focus on the aggregate effects of transit u...

Drastic shifts in prices and housing market trends in recent years, representing shocks to the housing system, have led many residential developers to pause or cancel their projects. In the already heated housing markets of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), these supply frictions can have ramifications for affordability. Our study formulates a standa...

Several spatial and non-spatial barriers limit the accessibility to Safe Injection Sites (SISs) for People Who Inject Drugs (PWID). This study develops an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to examine the effectiveness of policies to enhance SIS accessibility on site usage and opioid overdose deaths. The study measures the physical accessibility to SISs via a...

Careful bias management and data fidelity are key.

Interest in mass transit investment and transit-oriented development (TOD) is growing as a way to promote smart growth. These investments and policy changes may imply new housing demands, which are not well understood. Using Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada, as a case study, we address the following questions: (1) Do households in this mid-sized region s...

This study develops an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to examine the effectiveness of policies to enhance SIS accessibility on site usage and opioid overdose deaths. This supplementary document provides a description of the model design process using the ODD (Overview, Design concepts, Details) protocol for describing individual-and agent-based models.

(1) Background: Missing Middle (MM) housing may be critical to address decreasing housing affordability and to achieve critical density in transit-oriented neighborhoods; however, its production is in decline. We report on a case study of housing development around a new light-rail transit line in the Region of Waterloo, Canada, investigating the p...

Agent-based models (ABMs) have been established as a valuable research tool in the study of complex human-environment systems. However, it is still challenging to produce generalizable and practical results with ABMs for theory development. We use the case of the effects of “neighborhood” size on urban sprawl to illustrate the practice of generatin...

Since computing advances in the last 30 years have allowed automated calculation of fractal dimensions, fractals have been established as ubiquitous signatures of urban form and socioeconomic function. Yet, applications of fractal concepts in urban planning have lagged the evolution of technical analysis methods. Through a narrative literature revi...

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, gene...

Many studies have provided strong evidence of residents' support for the characteristics of transit-oriented development (TOD) neighbourhoods, but few have explicitly investigated the question of whether these preferences translate into their actual choices. How many households are experiencing a state of residential mismatch between preferred and...

This work demonstrates an interdisciplinary modeling process between economists and computer scientists to formulate an Agent-Based Model of Land Use and Cover Change (ABM/LUCC). The MR POTATOHEAD (Model Representing Potential Objects That Appear in The Ontology of Human - Environmental Actions & Decisions) generic modeling methodology for ABM/LUCC...

Agent-based models typically have stochastic elements and many potential parameter combinations. This requires that we conduct multiple model runs to sweep the parameter space, creating large quantities of computationally generated, hyper-dimensional, “big data”. Understanding the models’ implications requires structured exploration of these comple...

This chapter reports on an exercise in replicating the analysis of outputs from 20,000 runs of a social simulation of biodiversity incentivisation (FEARLUS-SPOMM) as part of the MIRACLE project. Typically, replication refers to reconstructing the model used to generate the output from the description thereof, but for larger-scale studies, the outpu...

Agent‐based models of geographical systems (ABM‐GS) use computer simulation methodology to model complex geographic human–environment interactions. This entry defines ABM‐GS and describes their user community and realms of application. It characterizes sources of spatial, temporal, and behavioral complexity in geographical systems and demonstrates...

The proliferation of agent-based models (ABMs) in recent decades has motivated model practitioners to improve the transparency, replicability, and trust in results derived from ABMs. The complexity of ABMs has risen in stride with advances in computing power and resources, resulting in larger models with complex interactions and learning and whose...

Land systems are the result of human interactions with the natural environment. Understanding the drivers, state, trends and impacts of different land systems on social and natural processes helps to reveal how changes in the land system affect the functioning of the socio-ecological system as a whole and the tradeoff these changes may represent. T...

This paper is a communication from the corresponding symposium at the Global Land Project Open Science Meeting, Berlin, March 2014. We explored the assumption that the ecosystem services-(ES) concept has the potential to support communication and collaboration between actors in land use planning. If true, the concept could facilitate collaborative...

The objectives of this study were to identify potential drivers of micro-scale commercial timbering events in West Virginia, USA, and to develop regression-based models of these events for use in integrated landscape models. Logistic and multilevel regression techniques are used to model timbering events at the forest stand and tree scale. At the s...

This extended abstract outlines a prototype metadata standard for recording outputs of social simulations, to be refined as part of a project funded through the third round of the Digging into Data challenge. This is with a view to gathering community feedback on the proposals.

Background/Question/Methods Exurban residential settlement, defined as low-density development that is often disconnected from city sewer and water systems, expanded significantly during the last half of the twentieth century. The implications of these development patterns for ecosystem function have not been well documented. Given the relatively...

Urban land-use modeling methods have experienced substantial improvements in the last several decades. With the advancement of urban land-use change theories and modeling techniques, a considerable number of models have been developed. The relatively young approach, agent-based modeling, provides urban land-use models with some new features and can...

Land-use change in a market economy, particularly at the urban–rural fringe in North America, is shaped through land and housing markets. Although market activities are at the core of economic studies of land-use change, many market elements are neglected by coupled human–environment models. We scrutinized the effects of the level of detail of mark...

A primary goal of Earth system modelling is to improve understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between human decision making and biophysical processes. The nexus of land use and land cover change (LULCC) and the climate system is an important example. LULCC contributes to global and regional climate change, while climate affects the functio...

Land developers play a key role in land-use and land cover change, as they directly make land development decisions and bridge the land and housing markets. Developers choose and purchase land from rural land owners, develop and subdivide land into parcel lots, build structures on lots, and sell houses to residential households. Developers determin...

Land developers are key agents in suburban and exurban residential land use and land cover change as they directly choose land for conversion, subdivide land into parcels, and determine the initial landscape form after development. Despite their importance, developers are underrepresented in agent-based environment and land change models. In partic...

Urban sprawl is shaped by various geographical, ecological and social factors under the influence of land market forces. When modeling this process, geographers and economists tend to prioritize factors most relevant to their own domain. Still, there are very few structured systematic comparisons exploring how the extent of process representation a...

Dutch coastal land markets are characterized by high amenity values but are threatened by potential coastal hazards, leading to high potential damage costs from flooding. Yet, Dutch residents generally perceive low or no flood risk. Using an agent-based land market model and Dutch survey data on risk perceptions and location preferences, this paper...

To explore beliefs relating to diet, work, and HIV/AIDS among the Busoga of rural southeastern Uganda, a cross-sectional survey of 322 adults was conducted in 2007 in Mayuge district, Uganda. Of these adults, 56 were HIV-infected, 120 had a family member with HIV/AIDS, and 146 were in households without HIV-infected members. More than 74.2% of the...

This paper presents an agent-based urban land market model. We first replace the centralized price determination mechanism of the monocentric urban market model with a series of bilateral trades distributed in space and time. We then run the model for agents with heterogeneous preferences for location. Model output is analyzed using a series of mac...

Heterogeneity in both the spatial environment and economic agents is a crucial driver of land market dynamics. We present an agent-based land market model where land from agriculture use is transferred into urban. The model combines the microeconomic demand, supply, and bidding foundations of spatial economics models with the spatial heterogeneity...

The HIV/AIDS pandemic threatens economic, social, and environmental sustainability throughout sub-Saharan Africa. This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring interrelationships between HIV/AIDS, labor availability, agricultural productivity, household resources, food consumption, and health status in rural southeastern Uganda. Respondents r...

We present a new bilateral agent-based land market model, which moves beyond previous work by explicitly modeling behavioral drivers of land-market transactions on both the buyer and seller side; formation of bid prices (of buyers) and ask prices (of sellers); and the relative division of the gains from trade from the market transactions. We analyz...

This paper aims to understand the effects of biases in individual flood risk perception on aggregated land use patterns and their implications for macro policy. We develop a spatially explicit land market model and param-eterize individual risk perceptions with data from a survey held in the Nether-lands in 2008. Two sets of experiments are present...

This paper presents a conceptual design for an agent-based bilateral residential land market. The design includes interactions between multiple buyers and sellers (household agents, developers, and rural land owners) and two local feedbacks to land value—price expectation formation based on local neighborhoods and spatial externalities. To address...

This chapter presents a "conceptual design pattern" (CDP) that represents key elements of standard ABM/LUCC models in a comprehensive logical framework and includes basic functionality and data often present in ABM/LUCC models. The CDP illustrates the key building blocks for ABM/LUCC models, creating a template to assist scholars new to the field t...

This article describes three agent-based social simulation models in the area of land-use change using a model documentation protocol, ODD, from the ecological literature. Our goal is to evaluate how well fitted it is to social simulations and how successful it might be in increasing communication between individual- and agent-based modellers. Such...

Land-use systems are characterized by complex interactions between human decision-makers and their biophysical environment. Mis-matches between the scale of human drivers and the impacts of human decisions potentially threaten the ecological sustainability of these systems. This article reviews sources of complexity in land-use systems, moving from...

Cross-site comparisons of case studies have been identified as an important priority by the land-use science community. From an empirical perspective, such comparisons potentially allow generalizations that may contribute to production of global-scale land-use and land-cover change projections. From a theoretical perspective, such comparisons can i...

The papers in this special issue, resulting from two workshops intended to chart the way forward for studies of complex land-use dynamics, suggest that the paradigm of ‘complexity’, in its multiple meanings, raises both new opportunities and new challenges that require multidisciplinary attention. The opportunities include the potential to explore...

This paper analyzes the spatial incentives created by distance-dependent negative spatial externalities, titled “edge-effect externalities.” It illustrates standard externality results in a spatial context and derives several new results. While the externality creates an incentive for a recipient to distance himself from the externality-generating...

The use of agent-based models (ABMs) for investigating land-use science ques-tions has been increasing dramatically over the last decade. Modelers have moved from 'proofs of existence' toy models to case-specific, multi-scaled, multi-actor, and data-intensive models of land-use and land-cover change. An international workshop, titled 'Multi-Agent M...

Perceptions of increasing land scarcity and negative impacts of chemical-based agriculture have led to increasing concern regarding the sustainability of food systems. Incompatible production processes among farming systems may lead to spatial conflicts and production losses between neighboring farms, and the magnitude of such losses may depend not...

This chapter explores the effects of a more realistic agent-based land exchange mechanism on the relative competitive success of innovative and imitative strategies for selecting land uses, using the FEARLUS-ELMM model. A key question in our investigation is whether land use decision strategies can be studied in isolation from land market exchange...

We present a new international project to develop temporally and spatially calibrated agent-based models of the rise and fall of polities in Inner Asia (Central Eurasia) in the past 5,000 years. Gaps in theory, data, and computational models for explaining long-term sociopolitical change-both growth and decay-motivate this project. We expect three...

We construct a spatially explicit agent-based model of a bilateral land market. Heterogeneous agents form their bid and ask prices for land based on the utility that they obtain from a certain location (houte/land) and base on the state of the market (an excess of demand or supply). We underline the distinction between bid/ask price and individual...

This chapter explores the effects of a more realistic agent-based land exchange mechanism on the relative competitive success of innovative and imitative strategies for selecting land uses, using the FEARLUS-ELMM model. A key question in our investigation is whether land use decision strategies can be studied in isolation from land market exchange...

Throughout much of human history, changes to forest ecosystems have come about through natural climatic changes occurring over long periods of time. But scientists now find changes in forest cover dramatically accelerated by such human activities as large-scale agriculture, the building of dams and roads, and the growth of cities with vast areas of...

Interest is growing in agent-based models of land-use and land-cover change (ABM/LUCC). Such models combine agent-based representations of the decision makers influencing a land-use system with a cellular landscape and are appropriate when complex dynamics are present in the system under study. This chapter reviews conceptual challenges related to...

This paper presents an agent-based model of land use designed to explore the impacts of edge-effect externalities—distance-dependent spatial externalities—on land-use pattern. While the impacts of externalities on aspatial economics measures such as equilibrium land rents and the distribution of economic activity are well explored, links between ex...

This paper test the hypothesis that conflicts along borders shared with conventional farms and potential external economies of scale have led to clustering of certified organic farms, using 1997 data from Yolo County, CA. Using a variety of landscape and areal statistics and a spatially autoregressive limited dependent variable model, we find signi...

This article incorporates a political decision process into an urban land use model to predict the likely location of a public good. It fills an important gap in the literature by modeling the endogenous location of open space. The article compares open space decisions made under a majority rules voting scheme with welfare-improving criterion and f...

The paper reports ongoing investigations on the size distribution of rural land holdings in the real world (specifically, in Scotland), and in the out- put of two simulation programs: a simple numerically-based simulation of the partition and repartition of a fixed-size resource between a fixed set of entities (referred to here as R-SG), and an age...

This article presents an overview of multi-agent system models of land-use/cover change (MAS/LUCC models). This special class of LUCC models combines a cellular landscape model with agent-based representations of decision making, integrating the two components through specification of interdependencies and feedbacks between agents and their environ...

Report and Review of an International Workshop October 4–7, 2001, Irvine, California, USA Organized in conjunction with the National Academies of Science Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on Agent-Based Models by the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Focus 1 Office of the IGBP/I...

In this paper, we propose a strategy for the developing spatially-explicit testable empirical hypotheses for agent-based models of land-use decisions (ABM/LUCC models). We argue that this development should be guided by the links between ABMs and complex systems and should therefore focus on emergent properties. Further, we argue that both landscap...

Agent-based modeling is emerging as a promising new tool for constructing spatially detailed models of land use. Agent-based models offer several advantages over previously used techniques, since they are well suited for modeling complex phenomenon. Several important sources of complexity influence land-use decisions -- for example, spatial heterog...

This article incorporates a political decision process into an urban land use model to predict the likely location of a public good. It fills an important gap in the literature by modeling the endogenous location of open space. The article compares open space decisions made under a majority rules voting scheme with welfare-improving criterion and f...

This paper examines the impact of distance-dependent spatial externalities, referred to as edge-eect externalities", on free-market equilibrium land use patterns. Under edge-eect externalities, maximization of production possibilities will depend on minimization of landscape fragmentation, implying that both the correct allocation and the correct a...

Many land use conflicts are characterized by negative impacts whose severity declines with distance. This paper demonstrates how these "edge effects externalities" may contribute to sub-optimal patterns and scale of land use, therefore providing a strengthened rationale for coordinated land use planning.

We construct a spatially explicit agent-based model of land market. There are two main actors in the land market model: buyers and sellers of land. Heterogeneous agents sort among locations with respect to the distance from the city center and environmental spatial externalities. Land prices are formed endogenously via agents' interactions. The lin...