Coupled urban change and natural hazard consequence model for community
resilience planning
Abstract
This paper presents a new coupled urban change and hazard consequence
model that considers population growth, a changing built environment,
natural hazard mitigation planning, and future acute hazards. Urban
change is simulated as an agent-based land market with six agent types
and six land use types. Agents compete for parcels with successful bids
leading to changes in both urban land use – affecting where agents are
located – and structural properties of buildings – affecting the
building’s ability to resist damage to natural hazards. IN-CORE, an
open-source community resilience model, is used to compute damages to
the built environment. The coupled model operates under constraints
imposed by planning policies defined at the start of a simulation. The
model is applied to Seaside, Oregon, a coastal community in the North
American Pacific Northwest subject to seismic-tsunami hazards emanating
from the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Ten planning scenarios are considered
including caps on the number of vacation homes, relocating community
assets, limiting new development, and mandatory seismic retrofits. By
applying this coupled model to the testbed community, we show: (1)
placing a cap on the number of vacation homes results in more visitors
in damaged buildings, (2) that mandatory seismic retrofits do not reduce
the number of people in damaged buildings when considering population
growth, (3) polices diverge beyond year 10 in the model, indicating that
many policies take time to realize their implications, and (4) the most
effective policies were those that incorporated elements of both urban
planning and enforced building codes.