A raster-based method to forecast the distribution of the planned settlements

Normally, agricultural land parcels being close to town centers and connected with road systems have higher probability to be converted for newly planned settlements because these land parcels have higher accessibility influenced mainly by the transportation condition. A comprehensive method is proposed to simulate the process of allocating land parcels for the newly planned settlements with the raster data model using some elementary spatial analysis functions provided by ArcGIS. The first step of the method is to construct the distribution of the cost-distance from each transferable land parcel to the centers of administrative units at village level (called 'origin' for short). The second step is to simulate the process to allocate the transferable land parcels for satisfying the land demand resulting from the development at these,origins'. It is quite possible that more than one origin is interested in the same transferable land parcel. Therefore, how to determine the priority of different origins to get the land parcel focused by more than one origin is emphatically discussed as one key point of the proposed method in this paper. In addition, some other aspects, such as the size of the transferable land parcels, which influences strongly on the results of assignment, are discussed as well. The proposed method has been applied in the Sino-Germany project 'Sustainable Development by Integrated Land Use Planning' and can meet the requirements.