Future population projections of urban agglomerations furnish essential input for development policies and sustainability strategies. Here, working within the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and using a simple urban-growth model, we estimate population trends throughout the 21st century for ~20,000 urban agglomerations in 151 countries. Our results suggest that urban growth in this century will produce increasingly concentrated cities, some growing to enormous sizes. We also demonstrate that, although detailed urbanization trajectories differ for different SSP scenarios, in all cases, the largest projected agglomerations of the future are more populous than the largest agglomerations today. Our projection strategy advances urban-population research by producing urban-size projections—for agglomerations around the world—that correctly obey empirically observed distribution laws. Although our method is very simple and omits various aspects of urbanization, it nonetheless yields valuable insight into long-term SSP-specific urbanization trends to inform discussion of sustainable urban policies.

Since accessibility is an essential factor in land-use and transport planning, several methods have been developed to evaluate it. Nevertheless, it has seldom been an essential part of performance measures for policy evaluation from the viewpoint of individuals' quality of life (QoL). The objective of this study is to develop an integrated evaluation method of accessibility, QoL, and social interaction which contributes to the evaluation of land-use and transport policies for livable and sustainable urban development. In this paper, based on quantification of the weights of multielements of QoL, we develop a QoL-based accessibility measure and a QoL performance measure to address appropriate policies of land-use transport coordination and integration by disentangling the mismatch between real urban structures and people's demand for QoL. Furthermore, we explore embryonic ideas for the development of a generalised framework of QoL evaluation, incorporating social interactions and institutional design which link the QoL concept with quality of space and quality of procedure.

Bangkok suffered from the world’s worst traffic congestion in the 1990s due to rapidly increasing car ownership, reflecting the economic growth and road-dependent transport policy beginning in the 1960s. Due to its monocentric but scattered urban structure, traffic congestion is severe, causing tremendous economic loss, deteriorating air quality, and badly affecting the quality of life. A historical review reveals that the urban and transport plan and development were not efficiently coordinated, resulting in unorganized suburbanization and progressively more severe traffic congestion. It is important to reveal the impact of the transportation project on the housing market in order to incorporate the policies for transportation and urban development. To define the impact, the OLS hedonic price model and the local multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) model were estimated, along with the condominium sales data. The results revealed that the impact of rail transit on a rise in property value significantly varied across the study area. It was estimated that, for the area along the major rail transit corridor in the city center, a premium of a location 100-m closer to the station would be more than 200 USD per square meter. At the same time, the value would be less than 80 USD for the area along the rail corridor in the suburb. These findings provide policy insights for future urban and railway development, including the proper coordination of rail transit development and urban development with subcenters, transit-oriented development, and improved pedestrian flow around transit stations.

Land-use strategies such as city compaction are the basis for creating livable communities with more accessible land-use patterns that reduce automobile dependency. In previous studies the various advantages of the compact city have been proven, especially from environmental perspectives, but there still remain major questions, such as how the compact city can be induced and whether it can bring a higher quality of life. The authors' main objective in this paper is to answer these questions by using a multiagent land-use transport model to represent the interaction of agents' locations, the effects of mixed land use, and the agglomeration merits or demerits of agents. This model is used to examine the effectiveness of policy measures aimed at achieving a compact city from the viewpoint of urban physical compactness, total trip length, energy consumption, and the social welfare of residents.