Abstract:
The enormous complexity built into cities makes them difficult to understand for any
purpose. The ever changing land uses in any city is not an exemption, despite its
importance for planners to know at some level of certainty. In order to overcome this
difficulty Cellular Automata (CA) models are widely used in the field of urban
planning as means of simulating land use changes with adequate bearing on the
complexities associated with urban systems. This paper is a demonstrative attempt to
model the land use changes in the Colombo Metropolitan area in Sri Lanka between
1987 and 2010, within a modeling framework developed with CA based simulation
application: Metronamica. Simulation results are assessed and validated using visual
comparison and statistical methods. This study is placed in a context where the
current planning practices in Sri Lanka are in need of robust methods and versatile
techniques to comprehend land uses in rapidly growing urban areas.
