Urban Complexity + Emergence: Procedural Modeling of City Activity and Form

Cities are immense and extremely difficult to conceptualize, let alone model, and previousdigitally based efforts have often failed to capture the complexity and indeterminacy of urbanorganizations. Architects and designers have had trouble conceiving of techniques for examiningthese systems due to their large number of interacting micro-parts that evolve over time. We’vealso had difficulty finding workable planning strategies that operate in a more decentralizedmanner to accommodate the multiplicity of (often autonomous) urban decision makers. To thisend, an interdisciplinary team composed of an architect and urban designer, a computer scientist,and a mathematician, educator and learning technologist are researching and formulatingmethods of examining cities using the agent-based digital modeling program NetLogo.