Modeling and simulating residential mobility in a shrinking city using an agent-based approach

Shrinking cities are characterized by a huge oversupply of dwellings and resulting residential vacancies. Discussions among urban planners and policymakers in Europe have focused on the consequences of urban shrinkage following demographic transition, fertility decline and individualization. In this study, the shrinking city of Leipzig in Eastern Germany is singled out as a case basis for the study of residential mobility and land use change using agent-based modeling techniques, in which social scientists developed a concept of household types based on empirical data that form a unique base; these techniques were used to construct a data-driven, agent-based model. The spatially explicit simulation model RESMOBcity presented here ‘translates’ these empirical data via behavioral rules of households. It computes spatially explicit household patterns, housing demands and residential vacancies. Based on three scenarios, population growth, stagnation and shrinkage, we show that population might stabilize within the coming years. The number of households is expected to further increase. We demonstrate that a selective demolition of vacant housing stock can counteract the enormous oversupply of dwellings and better balance housing demand and the number of available flats. Scenario simulation shows that the model can reproduce observed patterns of population, inner-urban migration and residential vacancy in a spatially explicit manner and thus can be applied to the analysis of scenarios of demographic change in urban regions. The presented model acts as a tool supporting the testing of hypotheses in social science research and allowing the quantification of land-use scenarios in urban regions based on household choices.