Resumen de Educational infrastructure and its impact on urban land use change in a peri-urban area: a cellular-automata based approach
Pedro Bueno Rocha Campos, Cláudia Maria de Almeida, Alfredo Pereira de Queiroz Filho
Educational infrastructure plays a crucial role in shaping urban tissue and this holds true mainly in informal neighborhoods of developing countries, where land use dynamics are constantly evolving. This paper is committed to analyze trends of land use change in a peri-urban area in the vicinities of a unified educational center (in Portuguese, centro educacional unificado ― CEU) named Paz, built in 2004, in the northern sector of Sao Paulo city (southeast of Brazil). A cellular automata-based spatiotemporal model was used to simulate land use change in time spans before and after its construction: 2000―2004 and 2004―2010. The model, which comprises 10 types of land use classes and multiple transitions, was run in a high performance computing platform and its parameterization was based on the Bayesian weights of evidence method. Urban landscape dynamics were analyzed with the aid of land use transition rates, the cells transition probabilities and morphological metrics of the land use patches. The results revealed that the yearly growth rate of informal urban settlements increased 27% after the CEU-Paz start-up; the transition rate to formal residential areas was eight times greater in the second time span, and the rate of unoccupied lands (vacant plots) decreased 37% between the given periods. Considering that the cells transition probabilities presented a strong spatial dependence with the distance to CEU-Paz, an unbalanced urban growth pattern was though observed in the studied area, which gathered informal settlements in physically vulnerable areas, although close to CEU-Paz, and drove the expansion of formal urban settlements to safe sites in its surroundings and predominantly close to previously existing transport infrastructure.
