Spatial Cooperative Simulation of Land Use-Population-Economy in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, China

The fast urbanization has eroded the city boundaries and made the mega-city region. It also brings great challenges to the sustainable development goals, such as excessive exploitation and population explosion. Classical cellular automata (CA) has been widely used to simulate the change of spatial features, i.e., land-use, population, economy, etc., which foster the spatial planning and policy-making. But they focus on one feature thus ignore their inter-wined influences. This study proposes the spatial cooperative simulation (SCS) approach to simulate the land use-population-economy changes in the megacity region. CA is used to forecast the spatial process of one feature. The interactions among multiple features are represented by taking one feature as the dynamic driving factor. The CA model is iteratively trained to capture the cooperative influence of multiple features. The train process will be repeated until the total errors is converged.