Cities and Complexity Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals

by Batty, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780262524797
• ISBN10: 0262524791
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-24
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

As urban planning moves from a centralized, top-down approach to a decentralized, bottom-up perspective, our conception of urban systems is changing. In Cities and Complexity,Michael Batty offers a comprehensive view of urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory, presenting models that demonstrate how complexity theory can embrace a myriad of processes and elements that combine into organic wholes. He argues that bottom-up processes--in which the outcomes are always uncertain--can combine with new forms of geometry associated with fractal patterns and chaotic dynamics to provide theories that are applicable to highly complex systems such as cities. Every theory and model presented in the book is developed through examples that range from the simplified and hypothetical to the actual. Deploying extensive visual, mathematical, and textual material, Cities and Complexitywill be read both by urban researchers and by complexity theorists with an interest in new kinds of computational models. Sample chapters and examples from the book, and other related material, can be found at http://www.complexcity.info/.

Author Biography

Michael Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London and the author of Cities and Complexity and The New Science of Cities, both published by the MIT Press.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
List of Tables	p. xvii
Preface	p. xix
Acknowledgments	p. xxiii
Introduction: Understanding Cities	p. 1
Urban Change: Complexity and Emergence	p. 17
Cells and Cities: The Rudiments of Computation	p. 67
Laboratories for Growing Cities	p. 105
Desktop Simulators: Hypothetical Urban Evolution	p. 151
Agents and Cells, Actions and Interactions	p. 209
Local Movement: Agent-Based Models of Street Systems and Buildings	p. 263
The Dynamics of Small-Scale Spatial Events	p. 319
Polynucleated Urban Landscapes	p. 353
Modeling Urban Growth as a Spatial Epidemic	p. 385
Self-Organized Criticality and Urban Development	p. 425
The Fractal City	p. 457
Conclusion: Understanding Models	p. 515
References	p. 521
Author Index	p. 545
Subject Index	p. 553
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