Evaluating the Efficiency of Transfer of Development Rights in Urban Housing Balanced Development Using Agent-based Modeling

Urban planning typically involves technical and political procedures of developing and designing land use and determining urban boundaries. However, similar to other government interventions, urban planning creates rents for some urban lands while causing losses to other lands. To gain the maximum profit, land developers prefer to develop lands that have acquired higher privileges, i.e., more extensive construction permits. It will make cities' development patterns unbalanced in favor of land with more accumulated planning rents. The transfer of development rights (TDR) is a market approach to designing urban development that balances. It evenly distributes the benefits and disadvantages of urban planning, especially in protecting historic buildings and agricultural and garden lands. This paper simulates the application of TDR as an alternative urban planning way to cope with the unbalanced development of urban lands in Tehran. We utilized an urban dataset from 2007 to 2019 and evaluated the efficiency of TDR using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM). Results implied that the usage of the TDR would improve the distribution of investment in Tehran in a more balanced pattern. However, more studies, especially considering the regional differences in the city and expansion of the model for other for-profit or non-profit usages such as urban gardens, make it imperative to use.