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University of Cambridge

Understanding the Co-emergence of Urban Location Choice and Mobility Patterns: Empirical Studies and an Integrated Geospatial and Agent-based Model

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Understanding and simulating the relationship between urban land-use configuration and patterns of human spatial interaction has been the subject of multi-disciplinary research. Conceptually, it is recognized that the location decisions of several urban actors including individuals, households, firms and public sector institutions, collectively determine the spatial distribution of land-use activities; the emergent land-use patterns, in turn, provide the structural conditions within which flows and interactions between locations occur daily and respond to each other over time. Over the past six decades, various theories and concepts from urban economics, social-physics, transportation studies, and the complexity sciences have underpinned empirical research and development of state-of-the-art simulation models to explore the land-use and travel nexus. Using a case study design and selecting the Kumasi Metropolis, a medium-size metropolis of nearly two-million inhabitants in Ghana, West Africa as the case study area, two main objectives, which reflect research trends and gaps in both the empirical literature and simulation model development have been addressed in this thesis. The first objective was to examine empirically, the location choice behaviour of households and individuals with respect to their residential and job locations, and the mobility patterns associated with the observed home-work location combinations within the metropolis. The second objective was to develop an integrated geospatial and agent-based model to simulate how the residential and job location choice behaviour of heterogeneous households and individuals co-emerge with mobility patterns in the metropolis. The empirical studies presented in this thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of how location-defining attributes at multiple spatial-scales interact with socio-demographic attributes of heterogeneous households and individuals to determine their residential location choice, job location choice and mobility characteristics. The development of the Metropolitan Location and Mobility Patterns Simulator (METLOMP-SIM)—an integrated geospatial and agent-based model also demonstrates how the encoded micro-scale behaviour of purposive households and individuals, interacting with each other and their environment dynamically, could reproduce macro-scale urban location patterns, property market price formation and evolution, and patterns and attributes of spatial flows and interactions anchored on the population’s residential-job location combinations.

Degree

thesis:*
Name dc:type.qualificationname
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
Doctoral
Grantor dc:publisher.institution
University of Cambridge
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Acheampong, Ransford Antwi
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Silva, Elisabete

Subjects

dc:subject × 7

Rights

dc:rights
Language dc:language
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Author Identifier
0000-0002-2712-3866
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/267913

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Cambridge University
Base URL
api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Acheampong, Ransford Antwi. Understanding the Co-emergence of Urban Location Choice and Mobility Patterns: Empirical Studies and an Integrated Geospatial and Agent-based Model. Doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.13849