Abstract
There is growing interest in the systematic scientific understanding of cities and urbanization due to an increase in data availability about many aspects of urban life throughout the world, as well as ready access to more powerful computation and modeling capabilities. Cities are manifestly complex systems in that social, economic, health and other aspects of urban processes are interconnected in the lives of each urban dweller and depend on the nature of urban services and infrastructure over their built environments. Despite this truism, the modeling of cities as complex systems across all these interdependent dimensions is relatively new. This paper presents a primer to different modeling approaches to cities and urbanization, pointing out their realms of applicability as well as critical areas where they are currently insufficient. Specifically, I give a short introduction to five main traditions—agent-based, spatial equilibrium, contagion, life-course and growth models—and discuss how they are becoming increasingly articulated and interdependent to create more realistic and more predictive models of cities. From this perspective, I summarize a research agenda for urban theory and modeling focused on understanding issues of growth and development across scales of organization from individuals to neighborhoods, cities and urban systems.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Acemoglu, D. (2009). Introduction to modern economic growth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Adsera, A. (2005). Vanishing children: From high unemployment to low fertility in developed countries. The American Economic Review, 95(2), 189–193.
Alonso, W. (1977). Location and land use: Toward a general theory of land rent. 6. Printing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Armstrong, G. L., Conn, L. A., & Pinner, R. W. (1999). Trends in infectious disease mortality in the United States during the 20th century. JAMA, 281(1), 61–66. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.281.1.61.
Bailey, N., van Gent, W. P. C., & Musterd, S. (2017). Remaking urban segregation: Processes of income sorting and neighbourhood change: Remaking urban segregation. Population, Space and Place, 23(3), e2013. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2013.
Balmer, M., Axhausen, K., & Nagel, K. (2006). Agent-based demand-modeling framework for large-scale microsimulations. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 1985, 125–134. https://doi.org/10.3141/1985-14.
Barrett, C., Berkbigler K., Smith L., Loose V., Beckman R., Davis J., Roberts D., & Williams M. (1995). An operational description of transims, June. https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=460374.
Barro, R. J., & Sala-i-Martin, X. I. (2003). Economic growth (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Barthélemy, M. (2011). Spatial networks. Physics Reports, 499(1–3), 1–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2010.11.002.
Batty, M. (2007). Cities and complexity: Understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Batty, M., Axhausen, K. W., Giannotti, F., Pozdnoukhov, A., Bazzani, A., Wachowicz, M., Ouzounis, G., & Portugali, Y. (2012). Smart cities of the future. The European Physical Journal Special Topics, 214(1), 481–518. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01703-3.
Becker, G. S., & Barro, R. J. (1988). A reformulation of the economic theory of fertility. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 103(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/1882640.
Benguigui, L., Czamanski, D., Marinov, M., & Portugali, Y. (2000). When and where is a city fractal? Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 27(4), 507–519. https://doi.org/10.1068/b2617.
Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2013). The origins of scaling in cities. Science, 340(6139), 1438–1441. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1235823.
Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2014). The uses of big data in cities. Big Data, 2(1), 12–22. https://doi.org/10.1089/big.2013.0042.
Bettencourt, L. M. A., & Ribeiro, R. M. (2008). Real time Bayesian estimation of the epidemic potential of emerging infectious diseases. PLoS One, 3(5), e2185. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0002185.
Bettencourt, L., & West, G. (2010). A unified theory of urban living. Nature, 467(7318), 912–913. https://doi.org/10.1038/467912a.
Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kuhnert, C., & West, G. B. (2007). Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(17), 7301–7306. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0610172104.
Bolay, J.-C. (2012). What sustainable development for the cities of the south? Urban issues for a third millennium. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, 4(1), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463138.2011.626170.
Brelsford, C., Lobo, J., Hand, J., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2017). Heterogeneity and scale of sustainable development in cities.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May, 201606033. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1606033114.
Briggs, de S., Xavier, R. P., & Rubin, V. (2015). Inclusive economic growth in America’s cities: What’s the playbook and the score?. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2621876. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2621876.
Britton, T. (2010). Stochastic epidemic models: A survey. Mathematical Biosciences, 225(1), 24–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mbs.2010.01.006.
Browning, C. R., Cagney, K. A., & Boettner, B. (2016). Neighborhood, place, and the life course. In M. J. Shanahan, J. T. Mortimer, & M. K. Johnson (Eds.), Handbook of the life course, Handbooks of sociology and social research (pp. 597–620). New York: Springer International Publishing. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-20880-0_26.
Bruch, E. E. (2014). How population structure shapes neighborhood segregation. American Journal of Sociology, 119(5), 1221–1278. https://doi.org/10.1086/675411.
Bruch, E. E., & Mare, R. D. (2006). Neighborhood choice and neighborhood change. American Journal of Sociology, 112(3), 667–709. https://doi.org/10.1086/507856.
Buch, C. M., Kleinert, J., & Toubal, F. (2004). The distance puzzle: On the interpretation of the distance coefficient in gravity equations. Economics Letters, 83(3), 293–298. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2003.10.022.
Bush, W., & Grayson, M.. (2009). Critical infrastructure resilience final report and recommendations. .National Infrastructure Advisory Council. http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/niac/niac_critical_infrastructure_resilience.pdf.
Castellano, C., & Pastor-Satorras, R. (2010). Thresholds for epidemic spreading in networks. Physical Review Letters, 105(21), 218701. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.218701.
Cesaretti, R., Lobo, J., Bettencourt, L. M. A., Ortman, S., Smith, M. (2016). Population-area relationship in medieval European cities. Santa Fe Institute. Retrieved October 20, 2015, from http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/6c15cd3a937adc784c0ed8385e1be3ad/.
Coale, A. J. (1989). Demographic transition. In Social economics (pp. 16–23). London: The New Palgrave. Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-19806-1_4.
Colwell, R. R. (1996). Global climate and infectious disease: The cholera paradigm. Science, 274(5295), 2025–2031.
Corburn, J. (2004). Confronting the challenges in reconnecting urban planning and public health. American Journal of Public Health, 94(4), 541–546. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.94.4.541.
Crutzen, P. J. (2006). The ‘Anthropocene’. In Earth system science in the anthropocene (pp. 13–18). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26590-2_3.
D’Addio, A. C., & d’Ercole, M. M. (2005). Trends and determinants of fertility rates: The role of policies. 27. OECD social, employment and migration working papers. OECD Publishing. https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/elsaab/27-en.html.
Dye, C. (2008). Health and urban living. Science, 319(5864), 766–769. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1150198.
Elder, G. H. (1998). The life course as developmental theory. Child Development, 69(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998.tb06128.x.
Ellis, E. C. (2015). Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere. Ecological Monographs, 85(3), 287–331. https://doi.org/10.1890/14-2274.1.
Epstein, J. M. (1999). Agent-based computational models and generative social science. Complexity, 4(5), 41–60. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0526(199905/06)4:5<41::AID-CPLX9>3.0.CO;2-F.
Frejka, T., Hoem, J., & Sobotka, T.. (2008). Childbearing trends and policies in Europe. BoD – Books on Demand.
Fujita, M.. (1990). Urban economic theory: Land use and city size. 1, paperback ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fujita, M., Krugman, P., & Venables, A. J. (2001). The spatial economy: Cities, regions, and international trade. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Galea, S., & Vlahov, D. (2005). URBAN HEALTH: Evidence, challenges, and directions. Annual Review of Public Health, 26(1), 341–365. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.26.021304.144708.
Gilbert, N.. (2008). Agent-based models. SAGE.
Glaeser, E. L. (2008). Cities, agglomeration, and spatial equilibrium. Lindahl lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Glaeser, E. L., Scheinkman, J. A., & Shleifer, A. (1995). Economic growth in a cross-section of cities. Journal of Monetary Economics, 36(1), 117–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3932(95)01206-2.
Greenwood, M. J. (1997). Chapter 12: Internal migration in developed countries. In M. R. Rosenzweig & O. Stark (Eds.), Handbook of population and family economics. 1. Part B (pp. 647–720). Amsterdam: Elsevier. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574003X97800049.
Greenwood, M. J., & Hunt, G. L. (2003). The early history of migration research. International Regional Science Review, 26(1), 3–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0160017602238983.
Hannon, L. (2003). Poverty, delinquency, and educational attainment: Cumulative disadvantage or disadvantage saturation? Sociological Inquiry, 73(4), 575–594. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-682X.00072.
Helbing, D. (2012). Agent-based modeling. In Social self-organization, Understanding complex systems (pp. 25–70). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-24004-1_2.
Henderson, J. V. (1991). Urban development: Theory, fact, and illusion. New York: Oxford Universiyt Press.
Hoornweg, D., & Pope, K. (2017). Population predictions for the world’s largest cities in the 21st century. Environment and Urbanization, 29(1), 195–216. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247816663557.
Ioannides, Y. M., & Topa, G. (2010). Neighborhood effects: Accomplishments and looking beyond them. Journal of Regional Science, 50(1), 343–362. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9787.2009.00638.x.
Jacobs, J.. (1992). The death and life of great American cities. Vintage, Books ed. New York: Vintage Books.
Jones, C. I. (1999). Growth: With or without scale effects? The American Economic Review, 89(2), 139–144.
Jones, C. I. (2005). Chapter 16: Growth and ideas. In P. Aghion & S. N. Durlauf (Eds.), Handbook of economic growth. 1. Part B (pp. 1063–1111). Amsterdam: Elsevier. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574068405010166.
Jones, C., & Romer, P. (2009). The new kaldor facts: Ideas, institutions, population, and human capital. w15094. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15094.pdf.
Keivani, R. (2010). A review of the main challenges to urban sustainability. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, 1(1–2), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463131003704213.
Krugman, P. (1991). Increasing returns and economic geography. Journal of Political Economy, 99(3), 483–499. https://doi.org/10.1086/261763.
Lichtenberg, F. R. (2002). Sources of U.S. longevity increase, 1960–1997. Working Paper 8755. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w8755.
Lichter, D. T., Parisi, D., & Taquino, M. C. (2012). The geography of exclusion: Race, segregation, and concentrated poverty. Social Problems, 59(3), 364–388. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2012.59.3.364.
Lynch, K. (1984). Good city form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
de Marchi, S., & Page, S. E. (2014). Agent-based models. Annual Review of Political Science, 17(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-080812-191558.
Mathers, C. D., & Loncar, D. (2006). Projections of global mortality and burden of disease from 2002 to 2030. PLoS Medicine, 3(11), e442. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030442.
McDonald, P. (2000). Gender equity in theories of fertility transition. Population and Development Review, 26(3), 427–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2000.00427.x.
Mcdonald, P. (2006). Low fertility and the state: The efficacy of policy. Population and Development Review, 32(3), 485–510. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00134.x.
Mniszewski, S. M., Del Valle, S. Y., Stroud, P. D., Riese, J. M., & Sydoriak, S. J. (2008a). Pandemic simulation of antivirals + school closures: Buying time until strain-specific vaccine is available. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 14(3), 209–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-008-9027-1.
Mniszewski, S. M., Del Valle, S. Y., Stroud, P. D., Riese, J. M., & Sydoriak, S. J. (2008b). EpiSimS simulation of a multi-component strategy for pandemic influenza. In Proceedings of the 2008 spring simulation multiconference (pp. 556–563). SpringSim ‘08. San Diego, CA, USA: Society for Computer Simulation International. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1400549.1400636.
Molho, I. (1986). Theories of migration: A review. Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 33(4), 396–419. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1986.tb00901.x.
Montgomery, M. R. (2008). The urban transformation of the developing world. Science, 319(5864), 761–764. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1153012.
Murray, E. T., Mishra, G. D., Kuh, D., Guralnik, J., Black, S., & Hardy, R. (2011). Life course models of socioeconomic position and cardiovascular risk factors: 1946 birth cohort. Annals of Epidemiology, 21(8), 589–597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2011.04.005.
Nagel, K., & Rickert, M. (2001). Parallel implementation of the TRANSIMS micro-simulation. Parallel Computing, Applications of Parallel Computing in Transportation, 27(12), 1611–1639. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-8191(01)00106-5.
Nagel, K., Beckman, R., & Barrett, C.. (1999). TRANSIMS for urban planning.
Newman, M. E. J. (2002). Spread of epidemic disease on networks. Physical Review E, 66(1), 016128. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.66.016128.
O’Rand, A. M. (1996). The precious and the precocious: Understanding cumulative disadvantage and cumulative advantage over the life course. The Gerontologist, 36(2), 230–238. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/36.2.230.
Oeppen, J., & Vaupel, J. W. (2002). Broken limits to life expectancy. Science, 296(5570), 1029–1031. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1069675.
Ortman, S. G., Cabaniss, A. H. F., Sturm, J. O., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2014). The pre-history of urban scaling. PLoS One, 9(2), e87902. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087902.
Ortman, S. G., Cabaniss, A. H. F., Sturm, J. O., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2015). Settlement scaling and increasing returns in an ancient society. Science Advances, 1(1), e1400066. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400066.
Ortman, S. G., Davis, K. E., Lobo, J., Smith, M. E., Bettencourt, L. M. A., & Trumbo, A. (2016). Settlement scaling and economic change in the Central Andes. Journal of Archaeological Science, 73, 94–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2016.07.012.
Peters, O., & Gell-Mann, M. (2016). Evaluating gambles using dynamics. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 26(2), 023103. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4940236.
Romer, P. M. (1986). Increasing returns and long-run growth. Journal of Political Economy, 94(5), 1002–1037. https://doi.org/10.1086/261420.
Romer, P. (1989). Endogenous technological change, w3210. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w3210.pdf.
Rosenberg, C. E. (2009). The cholera years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sampson, R. J. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277(5328), 918–924. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5328.918.
Sampson, R. J. (2012). Great American City: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sampson, R. J., & Laub, J. H. (1990). Crime and deviance over the life course: The salience of adult social bonds. American Sociological Review, 55(5), 609–627. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095859.
Schelling, T. C. (2006). Micromotives and macrobehavior (new ed.) with a new preface and the Nobel lecture. Fels lectures on public policy analysis. New York: Norton.
Schlapfer, M., Bettencourt, L. M. A., Grauwin, S., Raschke, M., Claxton, R., Smoreda, Z., West, G. B., & Ratti, C. (2014). The scaling of human interactions with city size. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 11(98), –20130789. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.0789.
Shen, G. (2002). Fractal dimension and fractal growth of urbanized areas. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 16(5), 419–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658810210137013.
Shuey, K. M., & Willson, A. E. (2008). Cumulative disadvantage and black-white disparities in life-course health trajectories. Research on Aging, 30(2), 200–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/0164027507311151.
Smith, L., Beckman, R., Anson, D., Nagel, K., & Williams, M.. (1995). Transims: Transportation analysis and simulation system. LA-UR-95-1664; CONF-9504197-1. Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States). https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/111917.
Storper, M. (2013). Keys to the city: How economics, institutions, social interactions, and politics shape development. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
UN-Habitat. (2003). The challenge of slums: Global report on human settlements. UN-HABITAT. http://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=1156.
UN-Habitat. (2012). State of the world’s cities 2012/2013 , prosperity of cities. State of the world’s cities. UN-Habitat. http://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=3387.
Warr, M. (1998). Life-course transitions and desistance from crime. Criminology, 36(2), 183–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1998.tb01246.x.
Willekens, F. J. (1999). The life course: Models and analysis. In Population issues, The plenum series on demographic methods and population analysis (pp. 23–51). Dordrecht: Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-4389-9_2.
Zhao, Y. (2003). The role of migrant networks in labor migration: The case of China. Contemporary Economic Policy, 21(4), 500–511. https://doi.org/10.1093/cep/byg028.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bettencourt, L.M.A. (2019). Complex Systems Modeling of Urban Development: Understanding the Determinants of Health and Growth Across Scales. In: Nieuwenhuijsen, M., Khreis, H. (eds) Integrating Human Health into Urban and Transport Planning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74983-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74983-9_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74982-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74983-9
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)