Abstract
In attempting to assess the past several decades of urban system modelling, the prospective assessor must revert to some basic questions about the purposes of such modelling activities. This line of reasoning leads to a more fundamental series of queries about the nature of the systems we are attempting to mimic through models. Accordingly, we must examine the urban system and its evolution over the past thirty years or so if we are to have some basis for exploring the utility of models in simulating these systems.
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Notes and References
Palen, J.J. and Flaming, K.H., 1972, (Eds.), Urban America: Conflict and Change, Praeger Publishers, New York.
The role of highways in urban decentralization is nicely documented by de Leon, P. and Enns, J., 1973, The Impact of Highways upon Metropolitan Dispersion: St. Louis, The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif.
A nice compendium of urban renewal criticisms and analyses is: Wilson, J.Q., 1966, (Ed.), Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Also see, Bellush, J. and Hausknecht, M., 1967, (Eds.), Urban Renewal: People, Politics and Planning, Anchor Books, Garden City, New York.
Wilson, J.Q., 1968, (Ed.), The Metropolitan Enigma, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
The report by Harvey Lithwick, commissioned by the Canadian government makes this point strongly. See, Lithwick, N.H., 1970, Urban Canada: Problems and Prospects, Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Ottawa, Ontario.
The new town program is summed up and analyzed in Schaffer, F., 1972, The New Town Story, Paladin Books, London. For a more descriptive and architectural view, see Osborn F.J. and Whittick, A., 1969, The New Towns: The Answer to Megalopolis, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Similar pressures and thinking was at work in many of Europe’s largest cities. See, for example, Hall, P., 1977, The World Cities, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York.
Neutze, M., 1977, Urban Development in Australia, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Australia.
This point is stressed in Goldberg, M.A. and Mercer, J., 1981, Canadian and U.S. Cities: Basic Differences, Possible Explanations, and their Meaning for Public Policy, Papers of the Regional Science Association, in the press. A perusal of Hall, op. cit., and Neutze, op. cit., will also show that there was in fact little reason to believe that the US model holds outside the US.
Lithwick, op. cit., and Goldberg and Mercer, op. cit.
See Hansen, N.M., 1973, The Future of Nonmetropolitan America: Studies in the Reversal of Rural and Small Town Population Decline, Lexington Books, D.C. Heath, Lexington, Mass. Also see, B.J.L. Berry, 1976, (Ed.), Urbanization and Counter-Urbanization, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, Calif.
For a four volume compendium on the growth control literature, see Management and Control of Urban Growth, 1975, The Urban Land Institute, Washington, DC.
This shift has been most apparent in the transportation planning area where construction ruled the planning process up through the mid-1970’s. The emphasis on Transportation System Management (TSM in the transportation planning jargon) as opposed to new construction signals this mind switch.
The Fourth Advanced Studies Institute in Regional Science, held at Siegen, West Germany in August, 1978 was organized around this theme of regional stagnation and decline in developed countries. The proceedings of the Institute document such concerns in a number of Western settings. See Buhr, W. and Friedrich, P., Planning for Stagnating Regions, Universitat Siegen, Siegen, West Germany, forthcoming.
For example, fighting over condominium conversion of apartment rental units has been observed in virtually every US city. The apparent trend of middle income households with no children living at home moving into central locations has put tremendous demand pressure on central city housing markets, and has encouraged developers to renovate sound, but old, structures and sell them as condominiums. The social consequences of such renovation and “gentrification” are as yet unknown, though there is cause for concern, as some cities such as Washington DC have experienced significant declines in their black population (in Washington it is estimated that the black population has fallen to about 60 percent from its high in the 1970 fs of nearly 77 percent). Where do the former residents find suitable housing, and what happens to the whole constellation of services that provided to former poor residents? These kinds of questions are beginning to be asked. It is ironic that self-regeneration of the American central city should represent a problem after all of these decades of large-scale federal spending to rehabilitate it.
Among the excellent reviews of the modelling literature see: Batty, M., 1972, Recent Developments in Land Use Modelling: A Review of British Research, Urban Studies, 9, 151–177; Goldner, W., 1971, The Lowry Model Heritage, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 37, 100–111; Putman, S., 1975, Urban Land Use and Transportation Models: A State of the Art Summary, Transportation Research, 9, 187–202; and Wilson, A.G., 1974, Urban and Regional Models in Geography and Planning, John Wiley, Chichester, UK.
See Putnam, S., 1976, Laboratory Testing of Predictive Land-Use Models: Some Comparisons, US Department of Transportation, Washington, DC; and Goldberg, M.A., 1978, Developer Behaviour and Urban Growth: Analysis and Synthesis, in L.S. Bourne and J.R. Hitchcock, (Eds.), Urban Housing Markets: Recent Directions in Research and Policy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ontario.
Similar points are made at somewhat greater length and with somewhat greater documentation in Goldberg, M.A., 1977, Simulating Cities: Process, Product, and Prognosis, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 43, 148–157.
Much of the following discussion parallels Goldberg, M.A., 1979, Modelers, Muddlers, and Multitudes: Establishing a Balanced Transportation Planning Process, A Paper presented to the 58th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC.
According to Lee, the prohibitive costs entailed in using the San Francisco CRP Model effectively led to the abandonment of model despite a $500,000 investment by the City. See Lee, D.B., Jr., 1973, Requiem for Large-Scale Models, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 39, 163–178.
See Goldberg, 1979, op. cit.
Lee, op. cit., 167.
Lee, op. cit., 176. Also see Voelker, A.H., 1975, Some Pitfalls of Land-Use Modelling, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
See Putman, op. cit.
See Wilson, op. cit.
Huff, D.L., 1963, A Probability Analysis of Shopping Center Trading Areas, Land Economics, 53, 81–90.
See Wilson, A.G., Rees, P.H. and Leigh, C.M., 1977, (Eds.), Models of Cities and Regions, John Wiley, Chichester, UK, especially Chapters 3 and 4.
Hueftlein, L.D. and Ash, D.A., 1974, The User’s Manual for the Simulation Supervisor, Resource Science Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.
This discussion draws heavily upon and largely synthesizes similar comments from Lee, op. cit., and Goldberg, 1979, op. cit.
Such a strategy was recommended early on by Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon in setting out ways to deal with complexity. See Simon, H.A., 1962, The Architecture of Complexity, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 467–482.
Lee, D.B., Jr., 1977, Improving Communication Among Researchers, Professionals and Policy Makers in Land Use and Transportation Planning, US Department of Transportation, Washington, DC.
In her review of model use in planning agencies, Janet Pack found that users tended heavily toward using simple models for forecasting purposes. Comprehensive impact testing and policy evaluation was not a preferred use. See Pack, J.R., 1975, The Use of Urban Models: Report on a Survey of Planning Organizations, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 41, 191–199.
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Goldberg, M.A. (1983). The Technology of Urban Systems Modelling: Nagging Questions, Sagging Hopes, and Reasons for Continued Research. In: Batty, M., Hutchinson, B. (eds) Systems Analysis in Urban Policy-Making and Planning. NATO Conference Series, vol 12. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3560-3_4
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