Abstract

This paper addresses the issues of urban growth sustainability by emphasizing on urban life cycle dynamics and its determinants with respect to the issues of environmental quality. A number of qualitative models have been discussed in order to understand urban dynamics. This paper empirically estimates the parameters of the mathematical model by the interaction of urban population, urban rent and urban income in the framework of the three dimensional Lotka-Volterra model. Numerical simulations of international cities are divided into five categories. The results confirm the cyclic behavior of the three variables with little difference in significance level. The findings of this paper and the application of the three dimensional Lotka-Volterra Model can be used for policy formulation for future urban planning.

Keywords: Urban life cycle · Lotka-Volterra · Three dimensional systems.

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