Exploring the effects of urban growth on farmland prices: an agent-based model approach
Résumé
This work revisits the issue of investigating the effects of urban growth on the market for farmland at the urban fringe by adopting an agent-based modelling (ABM) framework. First, we demonstrate that the model developed is able to reproduce theoretical expectations. Second, we propose two illustrative applications. On the one hand, we study the sensitivity of the results to the ratio of the cost of converting land from agriculture into urban use to the cost of urban densification. On the other hand, we assess the impacts of an farmland protection zoning where the conversion cost is set at infinity so that urban sprawl can no longer occur. Thanks to the encouraging preliminary results obtained, the model implemented is a first step towards a broader agricultural land market ABM that will take into account the heterogeneity of both agents and farmland and will aim to endogenise the formation of the agricultural land rent.