Advanced Urban Modeling

A Series of Six Lectures presented by Michael Batty

School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, at Arizona State University

April 26 – May 7, 2010

This course presents the rudiments of what are called Land Use Transportation Models (LUTM), sometimes called Land Use Transportation Interaction (LUTI) models. These models were first developed in North America from the late 1950s onwards, with rapid further development and applications in other parts of the western world significantly in Britain and Australia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Modelers gradually began to grapple with problems of making these models more real by disaggregating their spatial representation to ever finer zones and their demographic and economic sectors in more sectoral detail. They were also expanded to consider explicit supply side aspects of the urban economy, simulating rudimentary markets, while they also have been extended to embrace more formal temporal dynamics than the original types of such model which assumed the city to be in equilibrium. In this sense, they were/are referred to as comparative static models.

These lectures are mainly about these styles of land use transportation model. However in parallel, other models of city systems came to be developed, particularly those that pick up on the explicit dynamics of urban change. These models are based much more on representing the system using finer spatial cells closer to representing real development than the land use and traffic zones that are intrinsic to LUTI models. They also pick up on the representation of physical layers of cities using GIS and they have been extended into representing not only fine spatial layers of cells but also individuals or agents – usually populations of individuals – who act to change the development in these cells. These cellular automata (CA) and agent based models (ABM) as they are called, have barely been linked to mainstream LUTI models as yet. In the last two lectures in this series, we will sketch their rudiments.

The title of this course as being about Urban Modeling, which we define as subsuming Land Use Transportation, Cellular Automata and Agent-Based Models, also potentially extends to related modelling approaches such as systems dynamics and micro simulation.

In six one hour lectures, we can only cover a smattering of these ideas but it is possible that we will develop two related lectures (by popular demand) with respect to ideas about generating land use transportation models using entropy maximising, and then applications of CA to mainstream urban morphology as focussed on fractals. Watch this space for announcements of whether or not these two lectures can be scheduled.

The lectures that are planned are titled as follows. After they have been presented, you can click on each one and download the relevant pdf.

Lecture 1: Models and Theories: The Model Building Process – Understanding, Simulation, and Prediction

Lecture 2: Basic Principles: Social Physics, Accounting, Spatial Interaction

Lecture 3: Basic Land Use Transportation Models

Lecture 4: Large Scale Integrated Urban Models

Lecture 5: Urban Development: Cellular Automata and ABM

Lecture 6: Underpinning Cellular Automata: Modelling Fractal Cities

There are three ad hoc lectures that spin off from these and I will hold the first of these on scaling. The second of these involves entropy and scaling and the third scaling with respect to fractals.I will include pdfs of previous lecturesI have given on these topics for your information.

Lecture A: Scaling and Power Laws in Spatial Distributions

Lecture B: Scaling and in Entropy-Maximising

Lecture C: Fractal Cities: Simulating Urban Morphology

Background Reading

In this web page, we will provide access to pdfs of the lectures themselves as well as pdfs of the key readings that underpin the course

There is a general historical summary of the development of urban modelling by myself which is entitled:

Batty, M. (2008) Fifty Years of Urban Modelling: Macro Statics to Micro Dynamics, in S. Albeverio, D. Andrey, P. Giordano, and A. Vancheri (Editors) The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Physica-Verlag, Heidelberg, DE, 1-20

The best reviews of the Land Use Transportation class of Urban Models is by Wegener and this is available in several publications, one of which is

Wegener, M. (2005) Urban Land Use Transportation Models, in D. J. Maguire, M. F. Goodchild, and M. Batty (Editors) GIS, Spatial Analysis, and Modeling, ESRI Press, Redlands, CA, 203-220

I am afraid I do not have pdfs of these chapters – we are working on getting them scanned and up but it won’t be until I get back to the UK after this course. In the first lecture, I gave five references to basic ideas about models and these are as follows. You can download them by clicking on them in the order below. The second reference isn't scanned either but I expect there are various people aorund here in ASU who have the book

1. Batty, M. (2009) Urban Modeling, in R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (Eds) International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Volume 12, Elsevier, Oxford, 51–58.

2. Batty, M. (2008) Spatial Interaction, in K. K. Kemp (Editor) Encyclopaedia of Geographic Information Science, Sage. Los Angeles, CA, 416-418 (not yet scanned)

3. Batty, M. and Torrens, P. (2005) Modelling and Prediction in a Complex World, Futures, 37 (7), 745-766.

4. Lowry, I. S. (1965) A Short Course in Model Design, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 31, 158-165.

5. van der Leeuw, S. E. (2004) Why Model? Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, 35, 117-128.

And if you want some old background on these models, you can download my book Urban Modelling: Algorithms, Calibrations, Predictions (1976) from our web site by clicking hereleft. If you want a softcopy of the original, it has been reissued by CUP and you can get it from Amazon.com by clicking here right.

One Key Reference for Each Lecture

The background reading pertains to the first lecture. I have identified one key reference for each of the lectures and these are listed below

For Lecture 2 on Spatial Interaction, John Roy’s (2004) book Spatial Interaction Modelling: A Regional Science Context (Springer, Berlin) is a good summary. Get it from the library if your library has it. Here is the Amazon.com entry

For Lecture 3 on Basic Land Use Transportation Models, then the key handbook Button, K. J., Haynes, K. E., Stopher, P., and Hensher, D. A. (Editors) (2004) Handbook of Transport Geography and Spatial Systems, Volume 5 (Handbooks in Transport), Elsevier Science, New York, has several good article on land use transport models - see those by Horowitz, Echenique and Miller amongst others. Also if you log onto this link, it will take you to Google Books which has a copy of the entire handbook

For Lecture 4 on Large Scale Integrated Urban Models,the handbook edited by Button et al. which we referenced in Lecture 3 above has a good paper in it by Miller, but the two other key references are Iacono, M., Levinson, D., and El-Geneidy, A. (2008) Models of Transportation and Land Use Change: A Guide to the Territory, Journal of Planning Literature 22, 323-340, and Hunt, J. D. , Kriger, D. S. and Miller, E. J.(2005) Current Operational Urban Land-Use-Transport Modelling Frameworks: A Review, Transport Reviews, 25, 3, 329-376. Click the titles below to get access the copies of the articles

For Lecture 5 on Cellular Automata Models there is a relatively simple and I hope intelligible article I wrote in 1997 in the Journal of the American Planning Association: Batty, M. (1997) Cellular Automata and Urban Form: A Primer, Journal of the American Planning Association, 63, 266-274. But tthere is a lot to read on CA. My book Cities and Complexity (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005) has a lot of general material and covers the DUEM model. A more focussed book is Liu, Y. (2008) Modelling Urban Development with Geographical Information Systems and Cellular Automata (CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL). Click on the icons below to get to the article online and info on the books from Amazon.

For Lecture 6 on Underpinning Cellular Automata: Modelling Fractal Cities, have a look at our book Fractal Cities (Academic Press, 1994) which you can download from our web site. Click the link below. In the edited book, GIS, Spatial Analysis, and Modeling(ESRI Press, Redlands, CA,co-edited with myself, D. J. Maguire and M. F. Goodchild), there are several good articles on various apsects of ABM, CA and LUTI models which are relevant to many of the topics introduced in these six lectures. ENJOY.

I will slowly modify this set of lectures as I improve them and add more references. Dated May 7th 2010.Mike Batty.