Urban planners are designing future cities with new levels of integration between land-use, travel network infrastructure, and green infrastructure. However, standard ecological models currently only inform the land-use part of that design process and so species that must forage, move, or disperse throughout the city along a green network are left unaccounted for in most network infrastructure plans. Because of this historical isolation between the grey and green aspects of urban design, they have been modeled, planned and implemented separately, and without much consideration for their interactions. We have developed an integrated platform that models the link between green and grey land-use according to the transport networks that connect them and uses that model to test several possible network configurations of green and grey integration. We believe that ideal network configurations will maintain the movement and dispersal of individuals both locally and across the entire network, and by maintaining this flow, they can make urban ecosystems more adaptive and resilient to global environmental change. We test this assertion by comparing the performance of dendritic fractal networks against nearest-neighbor reticulated web networks using both ecological (e.g. extinction, diversity, ecosystem function) and social (e.g. land price, job creation, commuter congestion) response metrics and focusing on Montreal, QC, Canada as our primary test case.
Results/Conclusions
Our results suggest that many of the long-debated tradeoffs between dendritic and reticulated networks also apply to