A new way to think about demographic projection and urban sprawl scenarios in small areas

This paper uses a methodology to forecast the spatial distribution of households and empirically addresses how the urban sprawl within a geographical boundary evolves over time. Our case study is the city of Belo Horizonte in 2020 and 2030. The city of almost 2.6 million inhabitants is the third most economically important in Brazil and has witnessed an important trend of increasing density and verticalization. The hypotheses used in the simulation were created from the following data sources: the Brazilian demographic census of 2000 and 2010, zoning laws of Belo Horizonte, the Development Plan for the Metropolitan Area of Belo Horizonte (PDDI, 2010), and spatial data from urban sprawl. This information delineates the characteristics and conditions for future housing growth and density. We use Complex Systems models (cellular automata-CA) within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) environment to simulate prospective scenarios, and thus achieving precision at very low scales (an intra-urban scale named “blocks”) in 2020 and 2030. The empirical exercise in Belo Horizonte provides a contribution to the analysis of demographic dynamics applied to urban and regional planning, and in particular, how to integrate small area population projections to information on land use and occupation of urban land.