Modeling Cities and Regions as Complex Systems: From Theory to Planning Applications

by Roger White, Guy Engelen, Inge Uljee

The theory and practice of modeling cities and regions as complex, self-organizing systems, presenting widely used cellular automata-based models, theoretical discussions, and applications.Cities and regions grow (or occasionally decline), and continuously transform themselves as they do so. This book describes the theory and practice of modeling the spatial dynamics of urban growth and transformation. As cities are complex, adaptive, self-organizing systems, the most appropriate modeling framework is one based on the theory of self-organizing systems--an approach already used in such fields as physics and ecology. The book presents a series of models, most of them developed using cellular automata (CA), which are inherently spatial and computationally efficient. It also provides discussions of the theoretical, methodological, and philosophical issues that arise from the models. A case study illustrates the use of these models in urban and regional planning. Finally, the book presents a new, dynamic theory of urban spatial structure that emerges from the models and their applications.

The models are primarily land use models, but the more advanced ones also show the dynamics of population and economic activities, and are integrated with models in other domains such as economics, demography, and transportation. The result is a rich and realistic representation of the spatial dynamics of a variety of urban phenomena. The book is unique in its coverage of both the general issues associated with complex self-organizing systems and the specifics of designing and implementing models of such systems.

344 pages, Hardcover

First published September 18, 2015

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Roger White is Honorary Research Professor in the Department of Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Reviews

[Peter Aronson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four-and-three-quarters stars. This is a very solid treatment of dynamic modeling of cities and regions. It is solid in that they didn't just provide the math and the structure, but that they dug into the methodological and epistemological issues (the underlying philosophical issues) as well, and they gave a detailed example of the application of one of these models to the real world. There are no sweeping generalizations, no convenient assumptions of nonexistent simplicity made in order to build a toy model that has nice mathematical characteristics, but doesn't actually reflect reality. Reality is complicated and well as complex, and actually useful models have to be complicated as a result. This book describes the necessary sausage-making in order to engineer models that actually reflect reality in a useful manner. The authors spend a lot of time on how to calibrate models against reality, and issue of over-calibrating, when a past that could lead to multiple futures based on random events is forced to only one future.

It is hard to build models that actually reflect the real world in a useful manner, and the authors have shown the hard work necessary to do so. This makes an interesting contrast to Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies which is full of pretty mathematical relationships, none of which seem actually useful in providing any actionable predictions.

[Erin Caldwell]

I bit off more than I could chew here. Being an urban planner in fantasy only, it was far too academic for me to get through it. Perhaps another time.