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Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners today are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty in economic, political, and technological environments, especially at the regional scale. An increasingly common approach to addressing such uncertainty is exploratory scenario analysis. To provide new insights into the methods and utility of such analyses, we conducted a scenario analysis of the Baltimore (MD)–Washington (DC) region by engaging a technical advisory committee and exercising a loosely coupled suite of advanced transportation, land use, and environmental impact models. Our analysis suggests the future is indeed uncertain and may evolve into plausible but quite different alternative scenarios. Key drivers of these scenarios include fuel prices; the rate and form of technological change, especially in the transportation sector; and the restrictiveness of land use controls. Takeaway for practice: By developing exploratory scenario analyses and analyzing them using advanced computational models, planners can gain insights into how best to address uncertain development trends, such as how and to what degree planners can influence the adoption of electric and automated vehicles, how and where to guide development patterns through land use controls, and how best to respond to variation in the cost of energy, which could have dramatic impacts on the future sustainability of cities and regions. Although such scenario analyses cannot in most circumstances provide unambiguous robust or contingent policy prescriptions, they can provide important insights for raising public awareness and provide the foundation for further policy evaluation.

The project ILUMASS (Integrated Land-Use Modelling and Transportation System Simulation) aims at embedding a microscopic dynamic simulation model of urban traffic flows into a comprehensive model system incorporating both changes of land use and the resulting changes in transport demand. The land-use component of ILUMASS will be based on the land-use parts of an existing urban simulation model, but is to be microscopic like the transport parts of ILUMASS. Microsimulation modules will include models of demographic development, household formation, firm lifecycles, residential and non-residential construction, labour mobility on the regional labour market and household mobility on the regional housing market. These modules will be closely linked with the models of daily activity patterns and travel and goods movements modelled in the transport parts of ILUMASS developed by other partners of the project team. The design of the land use model takes into account that the collection of individual micro data (i.e. data which because of their micro location can be associated with individual buildings or small groups of buildings) or the retrieval of individual micro data from administrative registers for planning purposes is neither possible nor, for privacy reasons, desirable. The land use model therefore works with synthetic micro data which can be retrieved from generally accessible public data. ILUMASS is a group project of institutes of the universities of Aachen, Bamberg, Dortmund, Cologne and Wuppertal under the co-ordination of the Transport Research Institute of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). Study region for tests and first applications of the model is the urban region of Dortmund. The common database will be compiled in co-operation with the City of Dortmund. After its completion the integrated model is to be used for assessing the impacts of potential transport and land use policies for the new land use plan of the city. The paper will focus on the land-use parts of the ILUMASS model. It will present the underlying behavioural theories and how they are made operational in the model design, explain how the synthetic population is generated, show first model results and demonstrate the potential usefulness of the model for the planning process.