Human settlements, ranging from villages to metropolises, are at the core of many sustainability challenges. They are locations of economic growth and home to the vast majority of the global population. At the same time, settlements compete with food production and nature for the limited amount of land, and are increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts. As settlements are changing at unprecedented rates, there is now room to steer towards more sustainable trajectories. Land use models are important tools to explore future settlement change trajectories. However, current large-scale models only represent built-up land, and disregard different types of settlements. Therefore, they cannot analyse alternative settlement change trajectories or evaluate policies that aim to reduce potential negative impacts of these changes.
The Sustainable Settlements project ultimately aims to produce the first land use model that can simulate different settlement change trajectories. To that effect it will combine multiple methodological approaches, including remote sensing, spatial analysis, field work and systematic reviews to find how we can to guide settlements towards sustainable development trajectories. The work leading towards this aim will be conducted in two interrelated PhD projects:
- PhD 1 will identify settlements archetypes based on empirical case study evidence, and analyse how, where, and under what conditions these change.
- PhD 2 will also employ deep learning algorithms and Big Earth Data to generate a global map of settlement archetypes, based on their functionality, density, socioeconomic characteristics, and spatial pattern.
The results of both will feed into the development of an improved land system model, specifically designed to analyse settlement change trajectories. This model will subsequently be used to analyse the role of settlements in the global competition for land, and assess their vulnerability to climate change impacts under future scenarios.
The Sustainable Settlement project is funded by an NWO-VIDI grant awarded to Dr Jasper van Vliet. A team of three IVM researchers is working on the project: Dr van Vliet, Vita Bakker, and Job Rosier.
For more information, contact Dr Jasper van Vliet.