Geoffrey Caruso

University of Luxembourg and Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Theoretical developments are needed to interpret the increasing amount of large-scale spatial data about past settlements. So far, settlement patterns have mostly been considered as passive imprints of past human activities and most theories are limited to ecological processes. Locational and spatial interactions have scarcely been included as long...

The form and the size of cities influence their social, economic and environmental outcomes. The form of a city is itself influenced by the shape of its road network, but this relationship and how it is affected by city size are unclear. We analyse how road distances to the main centre vary across 300 European cities and how radial physical detours...

Aim: Wild bees still face striking shortfalls in knowledge of biodiversity in key regions of the world. This includes Europe, where despite a long tradition of data gathering, the continental scale distribution patterns of wild bees have not been systematically analysed to date. This study aims to characterise large-scale biodiversity patterns to:...

We argue that there is no one-fits-all “smart city” recipe to address the sustainability and socio-economic challenges of our ever-urbanizing world. If smartness is the ability to deliver useful information to citizens and urban actors in order to adapt their behaviors and policies dynamically and interactively in view of a particular social, econo...

The difference of a city's artificial land use (ALU) radial profile to the average ALU profile is examined for 585 European cities. Using Urban Atlas 2012 data, a radial (or monocentric) approach is used to calculate a city's land use profile in relation to distance to the city centre. A scaling law is used which controls for city size and populati...

Urban density is central to urban research and planning and can be defined in numerous ways. Most measures of urban density however are biased by arbitrary chosen spatial units at their denominator and ignore the relative location of elementary urban objects within those units. We solve these two problems by proposing a new graph-based density inde...

This paper studies the relationship between activity pattern complexity and car use using two multi-day surveys involving the same participants but collected just before and about one year after they relocated their workplace. Measurable characteristics related to two latent variables, namely activity pattern complexity, or trip chaining (e.g., num...

Urban green space (UGS) provision across cities is often assessed from per capita quantities. However these aggregate measures say little about the actual use of UGS because they ignore the relative location of UGS and citizens. Spatial accessibility approaches consider this relative location but mostly assume that benefits happen within close prox...

The repository contains the xml files of survey questionnaires on the use of urban green spaces. All survey files are translated into three languages (English, French and German). At the time of this publication, these questionnaires have already been used for conducting face-to-face surveys in 2016 in Brussels (Belgium), in 2017 in Luxembourg-cit...

Inductive locational models have been used for decades to map the probability of past settlements and identify the preferred environmental conditions for habitation. In this study we apply inductive modelling to compare the spatial structure of the settlement systems of hunter-fisher-gatherer groups (Narva and Combed Ware Culture) and early agraria...

We determine the functional form and scaling law of radial artificial land use profiles in 300 European functional urban areas (FUAs). These profiles, starting from a fully artificial surface in the city center, decrease exponentially, the faster the smaller the city. More precisely, the characteristic decrease distance scales like the square root...

Air pollution is of increasing concern to urban residents and urban planners are struggling to find interventions which tackle the trade-off between environmental, health, and economic impacts arising from this. We analyze within a spatially explicit theoretical residential choice model how different urban interventions can reduce exposure to endog...

Seen from a satellite, observing land use in the daytime or at night, most cities have circular shapes, organised around a city centre. A radial analysis of artificial land use growth is conducted in order to understand what the recent changes in urbanisation are across Europe and how it relates to city size. We focus on the most fundamental differ...

The behavioural ecological approach to anthropology states that the density and distribution of resources determines optimal patterns of resource use and also sets its constraints to grouping, mobility and settlement choice. Central place foraging (CPF) models have been used for analyzing foraging behaviours of hunter-gatherers and drawing a causal...

Daily mobility has been shown to contribute to the wellbeing of older adults, as it promotes healthy and independent living. However, very little is known about how the complex relationships between locations, geographic environments and daily mobility relate to wellbeing. In the current paper, we rely on the concept of 'motility'-defined as potent...

Purpose: Understanding the geographical and environmental triggers for active transport among older adults is crucial to promote healthy and independent lifestyles. While transportation research has long considered trip purpose as a major determinant of transport mode choices, "place and health" research has paid little attention to it, and even le...

The size and form of cities influence their social and environmental impacts. Whether cities have the same form irrespective of their size is still an open question. We analyse the profile of artificial land and population density, with respect to the distance to their main centre, for the 300 largest European cities. Our analysis combines the GMES...

Urban green space (UGS) has many environmental and social benefits. UGS provision and access are increasingly considered in urban policies and must rely on data and indicators that can capture variations in the distribution of UGS within cities. There is no consensus about how UGS, and their provision and access, must be defined from different land...

Comparison of average indicators for total UGS per neighbourhood (quartier), per dataset. Discretisation method: equal intervals. (EPS)

Air pollution bears severe health and environmental impacts and is of increasing concern to urban planners but densification strategies have ambiguous impacts. We analyse how households’ aversion to generating and being exposed to traffic pollution at the residential place and during their commute influences emerging urban structures and how these...

The increasing attractiveness of Luxembourg as a place to work and live puts its land use and transport systems under high pressure. Understanding how the country can accommodate residential growth and additional traffic in a sustainable manner is a key and difficult challenge that requires a policy relevant, flexible and responsive modelling frame...

This article focuses on the individual and territorial determinants of cross-border commuting from France to its neighbouring countries. We seek to identify whether cross-border commuting is a distinct form of commuting, especially whether it differs for an active resident from commuting outside his/her reference functional urban area. We use indiv...

The scaling of urban characteristics with total population has become an important research field since one needs to better understand the challenges of urban densification. Yet urban scaling research is largely disconnected from intra-urban structure. In contrast, the monocentric model of Alonso provides a residential choice-based theory to urban...

With the 2002 introduction of the euro as a common currency in Europe, the possibility has emerged to assess international mobility using this new tracer, given that every coin bears a specific national side. Using a simple two-country framework, four dynamic modeling strategies were designed in order to simulate the diffusion of coins and to under...

A new method is proposed for characterising local urban patterns at the scale of a large urban region. The approach overcomes the difficulties of surface-based representations of built-up morphologies and provides an efficient way to account for the proximity of built and non-built land. The strength of the approach resides in the direct use of the...

In this paper we analyse the profile of land use and population density with respect to the distance to the city centre for the European city. In addition to providing the radial population density and soil-sealing profiles for a large set of cities, we demonstrate a remarkable constancy of the profiles across city size. Our analysis combines the G...

This paper stresses the lack of attention paid to the geographical definitions of cities in LUTI models as one key detrimental aspect to transferring and generalising LUTI results. First, the argumentation develops from a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed publications about LUTI applications in European cities. We show that most authors do not assess...

We examine how geographical structures impact diffusion processes within a regional system. From the example of euro coin diffusion across countries, we show how the relative position and population endowment of regions impact our understanding of interregional mobility, beyond simple spatial interaction effects. The mix of coins of different origi...

In modelling residential choice we cannot escape the debate about the effect of societal context on an individual’s decision-making. This debate depends on whether we set more store by the aggregate scale of society or by the individual’s decision-making. An individual-centred approach will focus on the particularities of an individual and the way...

Due to the rapidly increasing percentage of the population living in urban centres, there is a need to focus on the energy demand of these cities and the use of renewable energies instead of fossil fuels. In this paper, we develop a spatial model to determine the potential per parcel for using shallow geothermal energy, for space heating and hot wa...

This paper describes a dataset of 6284 land transactions prices and plot surfaces in 3 medium-sized cities in France (Besançon, Dijon and Brest). The dataset includes road accessibility as obtained from a minimization algorithm, and the amount of green space available to households in the neighborhood of the transactions, as evaluated from a land c...

We analyse urban growth forms by means of a 2D microeconomic model where households value green space at neighbourhood scale. We analytically demonstrate that cities can grow more densely when households have the possibility to enlarge the neighbourhood in which they value green space, thus emphasizing the importance of neighbourhood planning in pa...

The article aims at revealing the role of green space diversity and the mix of neighborhood services on the price of residential land in Luxembourg. We use a multilevel approach to estimate a hedonic model in order to benefit from the hierarchical structure of the data and to reveal spatial heterogeneity in the valuation of these neighborhood quali...

the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg has emerged as a new player in research as part of a strategy to foster its knowledge for both economical and societal developments. In the transport research field, the University of Luxembourg (created in 2003) with its Geography and Spatial Planning Institute (created in 2007) and its Transport Engineering group (cr...

The aim of this paper is to study the utility variation related to the commuting mobility of University staff members due to their future workplace relocation. During the year 2012, a travel survey was completed by a total of 397 staff members, representing 36.4% of the university employees, who filled in a questionnaire which revealed complex deci...

Leapfrog development is a typical form of sprawl. This paper aims at analyzing the existence, size, and persistence of leapfrogging in a dynamic urban economic model with endogenous green amenities. We analyze whether incoming households choose to settle at the fringe of the city or to jump further away depending on their preferences and the struct...

This paper presents a method for determining and mapping suitable locations for development using Multi Criteria Analysis and the Analytical Hierarchy Process and considering uncertainties in the process. The method is applied to the case study of Howth (Dublin), where development suitability is assessed against specific protection and conservation...

Air pollution is a major concern in urban areas worldwide. The interplay between urban structure and air pollution from an environmental, health and social perspective is the focus of our work: we model how urban structure impacts traffic-induced pollutant emissions and the exposure of residents to those pollutants. We present a chain of models app...

This conference presented the outcomes of the MOEBIUS project. This project aimed to evaluate different land use planning scenarios in Luxembourg and in the areas adjacent to its borders by simulating future urbanisation, residential mobility, commuting mobility and the associate behaviours of travel mode and residential choice. The project has bee...

We present a model that simulates the growth of a metropolitan area on a 2D lattice. The model is dynamic and based on microeconomics. Households show preferences for nearby open spaces and neighbourhood density. They compete on the land market. They travel along a road network to access the CBD. A planner ensures the connectedness and maintenance...

Les auteurs analysent les travaux hypothético-déductifs, d’économistes et de géographes, qui modélisent des formes et structures spatiales où apparaissent des espaces verts/ouverts imbriqués dans des espaces urbains bâtis. Il s’agit, tout d’abord, d’économie urbaine théorique avec des interactions locales entre acteurs, en général dans un espace à...

An urban microeconomic model of households evolving in a 2D cellular automata allows to simulate the growth of a metropolitan area where land is devoted to housing, road network and agricultural/green areas. This system is self-organised: based on individualistic decisions of economic agents who compete on the land market, the model generates a met...

We present a model that simulates the growth of a metropolitan area on a 2D lattice. The model is dynamic and based on microeconomics. Households show preferences for nearby open spaces and neighbourhood density. They compete on the land market. They travel along a road network to access the CBD. A planner ensures the connectedness and maintenance...

We present a theoretical model of residential growth that emphasizes the path-dependent nature of urban sprawl patterns. The model is founded on the monocentric urban economic model and uses a cellular automata (CA) approach to introduce endogenous neighbourhood effects. Households are assumed to both like and dislike the density of their neighbour...

We propose a calibration method for a residential growth model that is grounded on a microeconomic cellular automaton. This model can be seen as a spatial and dynamic representation of an urban economic model with neighbourhood externalities. A 2D spatial equilibrium of residential locations is obtained stepwise through time instead of being a one-...

We propose a calibration method for a residential growth model that is grounded on a microeconomic cellular automaton. This model can be seen as a spatial and dynamic representation of an urban economic model with neighbourhood externalities. A 2D spatial equilibrium of residential locations is obtained stepwise through time instead of being a one-...

We propose a calibration method for a residential growth model that is grounded on a microeconomic cellular automaton. This model can be seen as a spatial and dynamic representation of an urban economic model with neighbourhood externalities. A 2D spatial equilibrium of residential locations is obtained stepwise through time instead of being a one-...

This paper presents a microeconomic model of residential location that explores the emergence of a mixed belt where residents and farmers coexist beyond a city. The model is based on integrating urban economics with cellular automata in order to simulate equilibrium patterns in 2D and through time. Households commute to a CBD and enjoy neighbourhoo...

This article proposes a methodology for the construction and the calibration of a micro‐economic urban land‐use model within an extended Cellular Automata (CA) framework. The methodology is applied to processes of residential spread in a part of the commuting periphery of Brussels. The model hypothesizes that households effect on urban development,...

La croissance urbaine est modélisée par un automate cellulaire intégrant les fondements micro-économiques de l'économie urbaine standard, à savoir l'arbitrage des ménages entre le coût de transport et le coût du foncier. Le calibrage consiste à trouver les valeurs des paramètres du modèle (élasticité mesurant des préférences des ménages pour les vo...

La croissance urbaine est modélisée par un automate cellulaire intégrant les fondements micro-économiques de l'économie urbaine standard, à savoir l'arbitrage des ménages entre le coût de transport et le coût du foncier. Le calibrage consiste à trouver les valeurs des paramètres du modèle (élasticité mesurant des préférences des ménages pour les vo...

La croissance urbaine est modélisée par un automate cellulaire intégrant les fondements micro-économiques de l'économie urbaine standard, à savoir l'arbitrage des ménages entre le coût de transport et le coût du foncier. Le calibrage consiste à trouver les valeurs des paramètres du modèle (élasticité mesurant des préférences des ménages pour les vo...