ABSTRACT
The recent tendency of settlement patterns to sprawl is a central issue for all policies endeavouring to adopt sustainable approaches. It is surprising that there have been few efforts attempting to predict future urbanisation patterns even in the case of a "no action" scenario. The question was partly addressed by the integrated models of land use and transportation developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Recent applications of these models (Putman, 1979), models developed by the school of Dortmund (Wegener, 1998), TRANUS (De la Barra, 1989) and the very recent URBAN SIM model (Noth, Borning and Waddell, 2003), just to mention a few examples, indicate that there is still lively interest being shown by experts, planners and politicians to find out more about the future functional and spatial patterns of cities and regions. A principal objective of these models is to produce spatial patterns which are in accordance with theoretical principles.
