The UPLAN Urban Growth Model (UPLAN) provides a land use evaluation and change analysis based on general land-use plans, population and employment projections, characteristics of housing, and other user-defined conditions. It is an integrated package of user-specified attractions that enable users to: 1) conduct a land suitability analysis, and 2) project future land use demand. UPLAN helps communities create alternative visions for their area's future by mapping alternative development patterns determined by local land development policies. Some of the policies and decisions UPLAN addresses include establishing various criteria to "weight" the suitability of different locations for a particular land use, incorporating various land use planning and zoning considerations and other allocation scenarios, and defining various growth scenarios. The model can also be used to determine various environmental and social constraints to growth by modifying the criteria and the associated weights.
The UPLAN model allows the user to develop specific parameters in the form of grids in which to model future land uses. The model allows the user to generate attraction grids, exclusion grids, general plan grids, and existing urban grids. Attractive grids are locations for future development (i.e., near to freeway ramps); exclusion grids, list areas where development should not occur (i.e. parks, waterways etc.); general plan grid is a composite grid of the general plan land use maps from the users region; and existing urban grid provides the current land use conditions. Each grid applies user-defined decision criteria (e.g., identifying and weighting grid factors), to derive study-area conditions. These decision criteria are applied to land use information stored in geographic information system (GIS) data files to create maps and reports showing where future development may occur.
General Info
Developers:
Developed by Robert Johnston at University of California, Davis; built by David Shabazian
Strengths:
• Easy to use: UPLAN allows users to prepare and evaluate alternative suitability, growth, and allocation scenarios by specific prompts generated by the program.
• Customizable: UPLAN incorporates information provided by the users and applies its decision-tools to currently available GIS and non-GIS data, allowing the system to be customized to many different geographic areas and conditions
• Integrated system: UPLAN provides an integrated software package that incorporates user-provided GIS and other data as a foundation and applies various evaluation/decision-tools (e.g., land use projection) to the underlying data. UPLAN uses currently available GIS data to prepare maps and reports showing the outcomes of alternative development scenarios on future land use patterns.
• The default six land use types (industrial; commercial hi-density and low density; and three residential densities) permit the evaluation of the impacts of the future land use pattern on runoff, water pollution, habitats, and costs from flooding and wildfires. Data grids can be a small as the data permit, generally 25 m grid cells.
Resources
User Input Requirements:
The inputs listed below are desired, but not required for UPLAN since the model can be run with default values. The more detailed specific inputs the user provides, the more accurate the analysis. The desired inputs include:
• Demographic and land use factors, population projections, persons per households, assumed housing densities per land use, average parcel size for each density class, employment by type, assumed employment density. (Hand entered by system user).
• Regional General Plans, and incorporated city areas provided by users Local Planning Organization. (Hand entered by system user).
• All roadway and intersection data obtained from U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) digital line graphs. Data must be entered for each development scenario.
• Major waterways, lakes, and rivers data obtained from U.S. Geological Survey hydrography digital line graphs. (Hand entered by system user).
• Major infrastructure locations, i.e. airports. (Hand entered by system user digitized data)
• Existing urban lands for the base year of 1990, general land use plans, light rail station locations, and slope data obtained from Digital Elevation Model USGS.
Equipment Needs:
UPLAN requires a 300 MHz or higher IBM PC (or other computer type that can run Windows 95/98 or NT 4.0), 32 MB of RAM, several hundred MBs (a few GBs even better) of hard drive space, and a color monitor (recommend at least 21
Limitations:
• Lack of sophisticated modeling: UPLAN provides a way for end users to visualize (as maps) the impacts of alternative development scenarios on future land use patterns. The users must provide existing urban land-use and digital land-use plans to the UPLAN system as inputs, as well as other normally available data layers. UPLAN does not provide the sophisticated modeling capability and/or theoretical basis to examine the interrelated factors of fiscal policies, and other planning decisions on the amount and type of future development and land use change that will occur. The attractiveness criteria are pseudo-economic, in that they represent land value and accessibility.
Staff Requirements:
Use of the model requires land-use expertise and basic knowledge of ArcView. Also, users will need to be able to program in Avenue to adapt the model to their data sets and policy needs. A three-county application in New Mexico by inexperienced users required about 3 person months of ArcView user, plus about 2 weeks of consulting by an Avenue programmer.
Software Cost:
The UPLAN software is available for free from the model developer.
Preview:
Available for free from the model developer
