Interaction model application for urban planning

Urban growth is a terrific issue for the next centuries. Monitoring the urban development in order to assure sustainable cities in the future is an absolute necessity. Decision support in this domain needs some spatial information enabling to forecast the urban development trends. Satellite imagery may provide reliable information assessing the different states of urban growth, but it is necessary to anticipate where future built areas might be located. This paper presents the interest of interaction models, more precisely the potential model, to define future development zones. This model is applied to the Strasbourg area (France) using remotely sensed data. Two images are used, one to initiate the model processing and the other to validate the results. GIS capabilities are applied to refine the results, adding traffic network in the study.