The growth and decline of human settlement systems and the evolution of their relationships is not a self-governing, self directing natural process, although superficial observation might give this impression. Location patterns, traffic and transportation processes, shopping streams, spatially divided labour markets, etc are the results of thousands or millions of human decisions, small and large, occurring over time as an enormous wave of concurrent, interrelated or unrelated, individual or collective decision activities. This book deals with modelling the decisions which underlie existing and future mobility and location patterns, and which have an impact on the physical appearance of the landscape, the price of building areas, daily travel time and numerous other aspects. The purpose of this book is four-fold: (1) to present a general survey of models for the analysis of mobility and location patterns; (2) to create a framework to evaluate these models and to facilitate the selection of a model for a given purpose; (3) to present a critical review of modern developments in this field of modelling; (4) to illustrate these developments in one specific field of application, viz by building a new model to study residential mobility and dwelling choices in the dutch housing market.
Abstract