Urban Systems Dynamics

This book contains the contributions presented at the international workshop "The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems: an interdisciplinary approach" held in Ascona, Switzerland in November 2004. Experts from several disciplines outline a conceptual framework for modeling and forecasting the dynamics of both growth-limited cities and megacities. Coverage reflects the various interdependencies between structural and social development.

USA. Analysis of dynamics of urbanization problems based on a simulation computer model of a system to prevent urban decline - covers theoretical aspects, urban planning, housing, improvement of the environment, the role of the urban area public administration in implementing community development and revival policies, financial aspectsmotivation of entrepreneurship, etc. Diagrams, and references.

This monograph presents urban simulation methods that help in better understanding urban dynamics. Over historical times, cities have progressively absorbed a larger part of human population and will concentrate three quarters of humankind before the end of the century. This “urban transition” that has totally transformed the way we inhabit the planet is globally understood in its socio-economic rationales but is less frequently questioned as a spatio-temporal process. However, the cities, because they are intrinsically linked in a game of competition for resources and development, self organize in “systems of cities” where their future becomes more and more interdependent. The high frequency and intensity of interactions between cities explain that urban systems all over the world exhibit large similarities in their hierarchical and functional structure and rather regular dynamics. They are complex systems whose emergence, structure and further evolution are widely governed by the multiple kinds of interaction that link the various actors and institutions investing in cities their efforts, capital, knowledge and intelligence. Simulation models that reconstruct this dynamics may help in better understanding it and exploring future plausible evolutions of urban systems. This would provide better insight about how societies can manage the ecological transition at local, regional and global scales. The author has developed a series of instruments that greatly improve the techniques of validation for such models of social sciences that can be submitted to many applications in a variety of geographical situations. Examples are given for several BRICS countries, Europe and United States. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of urban dynamics, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Understanding Complex Urban Systems takes as its point of departure the insight that the challenges of global urbanization and the complexity of urban systems cannot be understood – let alone ‘managed’ – by sectoral and disciplinary approaches alone. But while there has recently been significant progress in broadening and refining the methodologies for the quantitative modeling of complex urban systems, in deepening the theoretical understanding of cities as complex systems, or in illuminating the implications for urban planning, there is still a lack of well-founded conceptual thinking on the methodological foundations and the strategies of modeling urban complexity across the disciplines. Bringing together experts from the fields of urban and spatial planning, ecology, urban geography, real estate analysis, organizational cybernetics, stochastic optimization, and literary studies, as well as specialists in various systems approaches and in transdisciplinary methodologies of urban analysis, the volume seeks to advance the discussion on multidisciplinary approaches to urban modeling. While engaging with the ‘state of the art’ in their respective fields, the contributions are specifically written for both experts from a broad range of disciplines as well as for urban practitioners who feel the need for new approaches given the uncertainty of current developments.

This book is devoted to the modeling and understanding of complex urban systems. This second volume of Understanding Complex Urban Systems focuses on the challenges of the modeling tools, concerning, e.g., the quality and quantity of data and the selection of an appropriate modeling approach. It is meant to support urban decision-makers—including municipal politicians, spatial planners, and citizen groups—in choosing an appropriate modeling approach for their particular modeling requirements. The contributors to this volume are from different disciplines, but all share the same goal: optimizing the representation of complex urban systems. They present and discuss a variety of approaches for dealing with data-availability problems and finding appropriate modeling approaches—and not only in terms of computer modeling. The selection of articles featured in this volume reflect a broad variety of new and established modeling approaches such as: - An argument for using Big Data methods in conjunction with Agent-based Modeling; - The introduction of a participatory approach involving citizens, in order to utilize an Agent-based Modeling approach to simulate urban-growth scenarios; - A presentation of semantic modeling to enable a flexible application of modeling methods and a flexible exchange of data; - An article about a nested-systems approach to analyzing a city’s interdependent subsystems (according to these subsystems’ different velocities of change); - An article about methods that use Luhmann’s system theory to characterize cities as systems that are composed of flows; - An article that demonstrates how the Sen-Nussbaum Capabilities Approach can be used in urban systems to measure household well-being shifts that occur in response to the resettlement of urban households; - A final article that illustrates how Adaptive Cycles of Complex Adaptive Systems, as well as innovation, can be applied to gain a better understanding of cities and to promote more resilient and more sustainable urban futures.

Presents a modern and interdisciplinary perspective on cities that combines new data with tools from statistical physics and urban economics.