Global and Local Modeling of Land Use Change in the Border Cities of Laredo, Texas, USA and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

This paper estimates global logistic regression and logistic geographically weighted regression (GWR) models of urban growth in the adjacent border cities of Laredo, Texas in the United States and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas in Mexico, for two time periods from 1985 to 2014. Historical land use and land cover patterns were monitored through Landsat imagery from the United States Geological Survey to identify instances of urban growth through land type change. Data on socioeconomic variables related to urban growth were collected from various sources and used as independent variables. In both time periods, the logistic GWR was proven to be a complementary model for the global logistic regression to explore the urban growth effect. In addition, GWR outperformed the global logistic regression model with respect to goodness of fit. These results suggest that local models are complementary to global models to empirically analyze the determinants of urban growth in study areas that contain political borders, presumably because the relationships between socioeconomic factors and urban growth are characterized by spatial heterogeneity in such areas. The spatial variable of the relationship between urban growth and the neighborhood interactions and proximity effect present the idea of complexity and interconnections between the land use change and associated factors.