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Population-Morphology Attribution
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PMA: Population-Morphology Attribution

Code: Coming Soon
Origin: Developed for IM3
No tools currently exist which create spatially explicit projections of urban morphology – particularly building size and shape – in response to scenarios of future urban populations. PMA uses the SSPs projections of future urban population and a large dataset of building locations, height, and area. PMA addresses the gap in building level projections by leveraging present day data on building size to parameterize the national scale distribution of aggregate building volume across cities, the within-city overall distribution of building sizes, and the local index of spatial autocorrelation between buildings. National scale relationships between urban population and aggregate building volume are used to estimate total required buildings for the projected future population. The extent to which the volume of individual buildings within each conform to a pareto distribution is used to estimate the population of buildings of any building volume based on the expected aggregate building volume. Finally, estimates of the Local Index of Spatial-Autocorrelation are used to identify the most likely height and volume of new buildings, based on the location. Model outputs are a neighborhood scale projection on the distribution of the heights of new buildings, based on the projected population increase from SSPs. This is used as an input to URBN-LMC and NATRUF to create a spatially explicit projection of exact building locations.

PMA modeling workflow
Credit: Christa Brelsford

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