The increasing concern over the last years about sustainable development has brought forth the usage of quantitative models in the field of transport and spatial planning. This project proposes to improve our understanding of the interaction between transport and land use models and to increase the readability of their results for decision makers at all levels. From a scientific standpoint, the building of large forecast models that span several disciplines of social sciences and natural sciences is a major challenge for the upcoming years. In particular, disciplines that focus on sustainable development must be able to integrate in a consistent way economic models with physical and environmental ones. The interaction between mobility and land use is an ideal example of such integration. So far, there does not exist any framework that integrates state-of-the-art spatial economic models (of housing market, location choice, etc.) and modern transportation models (i.e. time-dependent segmented travel demand and traffic) under the same umbrella and with the support of the latest technology to analyse and disseminate the results. Several research teams have embarked on that exciting challenge in the world: URBANSIM (USA)(Waddell et al.2003), ILUTE (Canada)(Salvini and Miller 2003), ILUMASS (Germany)(Moeckel et al. 2002) among others. The scientific challenge is to bring together the skills from various disciplines: (a) sophisticated traffic models have been mainly developed by engineers without much concern about the socio-economic reasons why travel demand arises in the first place; (b) economists often treat the transportation sector as a black box and tend to prefer the development of aggregate mathematical models; (c) planners and geographers are concerned about spatial development, have the knowledge of the relevant mechanisms and recognize the need for innovative tools but do not have the training to develop complex numerical forecast models; (d) lastly, computer scientists are nowadays the only actors with the appropriate technical training to design such complex models but obviously they lack the theoretical background for modelling cities and mobility. The project plans to build on accumulated experience at several institutions both academic and from the private sector in the field of operational Land Use and Transport Integrated (LUTI) models. The programme of the project includes the ongoing efforts in Paris and Lyon to have operational applications of the OPUS/URBANSIM framework. It also includes the test of an experimental yet promising approach consisting of the PIRANDELLO model. While maintaining this effort, the project also plans to focus on some particular issues regarding the improvement of a) real estate price models; b) location choice models of commercial activities and c) transportation models by using time-dependent approach (METROPOLIS). An important aspect of PLAINSUDD is to dedicate substantial efforts to the development of MOSART which is a web computer platform to disseminate the results of such models. The idea is that the system is going to be able to show the future aspects of the simulated city in ten or twenty years in a manner that is both intuitive and accessible to the decision makers. For this purpose, LET will team with GEOMOD to develop and implement MOSART using the latest web technologies and industry standards such as VISUM transportation modelling software. The prototype of MOSART is meant to be a proof of concept easily transferable to other cities that could be potentially interested in such prediction tool.

The EUREQua project (multidisciplinary assessment and environmental improvement of neighborhoods) questions the implications of the environmental improvement of urban life at the neighborhood level. It adopts an original methodological approach that relies on a multidisciplinary team involving geographers, sociologists, atmospheric physicists, acousticians and architects, in collaboration with officials of urban living. The research question is: "How to bring forth a conception of the environmental quality of living that combines a renewed reflection on a) the materiality of the urban environment, b) sensitive and social approaches of relationship to the environment? " The scientific objectives are: 1) To understand –and model- the interference between different parameters of the physical environment, in connection with certain practices of people. The physical characterization of neighborhoods focuses on microclimate, noise and air quality, three parameters closely correlated to the notions of nuisance or level of comfort for the inhabitants, and also "soft targets" relatively new in the field of urban regeneration. 2) To explore the "subjective" dimension of the environmental quality, based on perceptions and representations, using the notion of "ambiances". We take into consideration the relationship to living environment and lifeplace, both in its social and political aspects. 3) To combine the results of interdisciplinary research in order to produce a decision -making tool for policy makers. The team will work on three neighborhoods in Paris, Toulouse and Marseilles, cities already invested by the different project partners. The first phase of the project is to identify (based on specific criteria across disciplines) relevant areas, namely those with rehabilitation ("re-qualification”) projects and specific environmental issues. The concept of environmental quality of life will be addressed by combining approaches from different scientific traditions: (i) A geographical and social approach mobilizing techniques including social survey to understand the logic involved in the construction of the concept of environmental quality and its perception. People, technicians, and elected other officials of the living will be surveyed. Field studies will also help to mobilize social actors who will be involved at several stages of research. (ii) An approach based on physical phenomena impacting living quality (noise, traffic, air quality, microclimate), their interactions and impacts associated with certain uses. It will combine an experimental campaign (in conjunction with the surveys) and integrated modeling. As part of an operational perspective to help the public action, the project aims ultimately to develop and test a participatory mechanism to generate and evaluate scenarios of environmental improvement of a neighborhood. Participatory workshops (residents and officials) will contribute to identify in each district expectations and proposals that will be taken into account by the professionals involved in the project (Agency Lion) to generate scenarios of (re) development . Scenarios will then be evaluated based on the integrated modeling by quantifying the impacts of (re) developments on the outdoor ambience. The approach will be finally formalized in a methodological handbook for decision makers for assessing and improving neighbourhoods environmental quality.

In a context of climate change, dwindling fossil resources and mild economic growth, urban sustainability has become a key policy issue. Given the complexity of modern urban areas, designing sustainable policies calls for more than sheer expert knowledge. This is especially true of transport or land use policies, because of the strong interplay between the land use and the transportation systems. Policies that seem perfectly sound intuitively may ultimately yield undesirable effects because of this connection, which is extremely hard to apprehend without the help of numerical simulations. Land use and transport integrated (LUTI) modeling thus offers invaluable analysis tools for planners working on transportation and urban projects. Yet, very few local authorities in charge of planning make use of these strategic models. The explanation lies first in the difficulty to calibrate these models, second in the lack of confidence in their results, which itself stems from the absence of any well-defined validation procedure. This proposal aims to foster the use of LUTI models for the design and evaluation of land use and transport policies by addressing these two impediments. This involves: (a) defining a calibration methodology and developing relevant and efficient algorithms to facilitate the parameter estimation of LUTI models; (b) defining a validation methodology, in both the historical and urban economics senses, and developing the related algorithms. In both cases, analyzing the uncertainty that may arise from either the data or the underlying equations, quantifying how these uncertainties propagate in the model, and performing sensitivity analysis to determine the relevance of the various data and model parameters are of major importance. Completing these various tasks would make LUTI models easier to implement, and greatly enhance the confidence in their results. Three LUTI models will serve as sample to test the methodologies that will be developed in the CITiES project: TRANUS, UrbanSim, and PIRANDELLO. They are quite representative of LUTI models, with two equilibrium models and one activity-based model (or transition model). TRANUS and UrbanSim are open source and also the most largely applied models worldwide, while PIRANDELLO is the only operating model developed in France. The study areas are the Grenoble region for TRANUS, the Lyon region for UrbanSim and the Paris region for PIRANDELLO, which offer different local contexts. The consortium also intends to support the dissemination of LUTI models and CITiES results through significant interactions with policy-makers and end users, in the form of workshops and information meetings. Besides the scientific difficulties raised by the development of adequate methodologies, another important issue lies in the significant amount of data that is needed to perform the historical validation steps for the case studies. Data acquisition and post treatment will therefore be a task in itself. To successfully carry out the CITiES project, the consortium can draw on two main strengths: • its unique panel of experts in urban modeling, urban planning, mathematics and computer science, which is to be the cornerstone of the development of innovative tools for the calibration and the management of uncertainties in LUTI models; • the significant experience of most partners with LUTI modeling. The partnership with the IAU îdF and the AURG will also prove extremely fruitful, considering both the data issues and the firm intent to interact with end users. If the pluridisciplinary character of the project is clearly an asset, it may also constitute a more important difficulty in terms of communication between team members; particular care will be paid in the project management to ensure smooth exchanges of information and knowledge and mutual understanding between the different scientific communities involved in the project.