Achieving a Sustainable Urban Form through Land Use Optimisation: Insights from Bekasi City’s Land-Use Plan (2010–2030)

Cities worldwide have been trying to achieve a sustainable urbanform to handle their rapid urban growth. Many sustainable urbanforms have been studied and two of them, the compact cityand the eco city, were chosen in this study as urban form foundations. Based on these forms, four sustainable citycriteria (compactness, compatibility, dependency, and suitability) were considered as necessary functions for land useoptimisation. This study presents a land useoptimisation as a method for achieving a sustainable urbanform. Three optimisation methods (particle swarm optimisation, genetic algorithms, and a local search method) were combined into a single hybrid optimisation method for land usein Bekasi city, Indonesia. It was also used for examining Bekasi city’s land-use-plan(2010–2030) after optimising current (2015) and future land use(2030). After current land useoptimisation, the score of sustainable citycriteria increased significantly. Three important centres of land use(commercial, industrial, and residential) were also created through clustering the results. These centres were slightly different from centres of the city plan zones. Additional land usesin 2030 were predicted using a nonlinear autoregressive neural network with external input. Three scenarios were used for allocating these additional land usesincluding sustainable development, government policy, and business-as-usual. Future land useallocation in 2030 found that the sustainable development scenario showed better performance compared to government policy and business-as-usual scenarios.