Urban Simulation Models For Public Policy Analysis

Recognizing that "our present processes of urban community development programs were wasteful and destructive and that our existing urban development programs were contributing to that waste and destruction",l the U. S. Congress enacted the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1970 with the stated objective "the development of a national urban growth policy". The most inno 2 vative portion of this legislation was Title VII of this Act which authorizes the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to guarantee loans of up to $50 million to public or private developers of new communities. The Congress looked towards new communities as a strategy to avoid the continuing problems of increased, unplanned urban growth and the associated inefficient and wasteful use of land resources, pollution of air and water, inefficient and expensive public services and facilities and segregation of people by 3 income and race • The Office of New Communities Development (ONCD) was established in the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to implement a strong new communities program.

This book was first published in 1983.

This book, Urban Simulation Modeling: An Introduction and Experimental Applications in the Czech Republic, provides readers with a review of basic urban simulation modeling methodology and discusses the constraints and potentials of its application in the Czech Republic. The first part of the book elaborates on eleven distinct urban simulation models with the aim of illustrating the basic theoretical and methodological approaches to urban simulation modeling. The analysis of the models focuses on the way the models represent essential urban entities and processes with the primary objective to make the assumptions on which the models are based more explicit. Special emphasis is placed on the behavioral content of the models. The first part concludes with a discussion of the potential use of the models for policy analysis. In the second part of the book, several experimental simulation models illustrate the potentials and limits of the micro-simulation modeling of the most essential urban processes and provide methodological and technical guidance for their development and implementation in the Czech Republic.

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.