ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how European cities are evolving in the period 2010-2050, according to the reference configuration of the LUISA platform. The LUISA platform has been specifically designed to assess territorial impacts of European policies by providing a vision of possible futures and quantitative comparisons between policy options. The chapter elaborates LUISA's demand and land allocation modules. The demand module captures top-down or macro drivers of land use change that limit the regional quantities of the modelled land use types. The demands for different land use categories are modelled by specialised upstream models. The chapter provides a sketch of the burgeoning academic field of urban land use models, and summarises the main technical structural characteristics of LUISA. The chapter presents the key trends governing land use evolution in Europe for the future decades and how these influence urban developments by looking into a few key indicators.
