Spatiotemporal modeling of interactions between urbanization and flood risk: a multi-level approach

The main goal of this PhD research is to investigate the expected flood damage for future urban patterns at different scales. Four main steps are followed to accomplish this goal. In the first step, a retrospective analysis is performed for the evolution of the urban development in Wallonia (Belgium) as a case study. Afterward, two land use change models, cellular automata-based, and agent-based are proposed and compared. Based on this comparison, the agent-based model is employed to simulate future urbanization scenarios. An important feature of this research is evident in the consideration of the multiple densities of built-up areas, which enables to study both expansion and densification processes. As the model simulates urbanization up to 2100, forecasting land use change over such time frames entails very significant uncertainties. In this regard, uncertainty in land use change models has been considered. In the third step, 24 urbanization scenarios that differed in terms of spatial policies and urbanization rate are generated. The simulated scenarios have then been integrated with a hydrological model. The results suggest that urban development will continue within flood-prone zones in a number of scenarios. Therefore, in the fourth and last step, a procedural urban generation system is developed to analyze the respective influence of various urban layout characteristics on inundation flow, which assists in designing flood-resistant urban layouts within the flood-prone zones.