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Dr. Paul M. Torrens, Center for Urban Science + Progress, New York University |
Building mega-models for megacities
Publications are here | Project overview | Demonstrations | Eye candy | Related groups | |
Project overview | |
Megacities are urban behemoths: urban systems with populations exceeding 10 million inhabitants. Understanding how and why megacities form in diverse locations, at varying times, and how they develop over diverse time-scales are important goals for science across disciplines and interests. In the last thirty years, the number of megacities in the world has increased from three to twenty. The United States, for example, hosts three megacities: New York, Los Angeles, and the burgeoning Chicago megacity. The geography of this mega-urbanization is uneven. Most megacities in the developed world are projected to reach a level of stasis in their growth, growing at slower rates as their populations saturate their urban environment and the role that they play in their constituent national systems—and globally—cements, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, megacities in the developing world are forecast to accelerate in their growth: Lagos megacity is projected to expand by 48%, adding 5.2 million people (to 16.1 million total) between 2005 and 2015, Dhaka is estimated to grow by 35% (+4.4 million, to 16.8 million total), Karachi by 31% (+3.6 million, to 15.2 million total), Jakarta by 27% (+3.6 million, to 16.8 million total), and Kolkata by 19% (+2.7 million, to 17 million total) over the same time period. As megacities grow and consolidate with massive tangible footprints and huge populations, so also will their influence on the world’s physical, natural, social, and technical systems expand and intensify. The pace of their emergence, development, and growth has, to a certain extent, outpaced our ability—as scientists—to keep track of their driving mechanics. Appreciating and understanding the future evolution of megacities is critical in explaining the futures of the world’s demography, economic markets, climate variability, innovation, and in postulating about many other factors. Exploring these issues is largely intractable without the use of computer models. Yet, the traditional cadre of simulation methodology that we have at our disposal is largely inadequate for examining the complexity of megacities in any serious fashion and serves to limit the range of questions that scientists can pose in simulation. Mega-models are not commonly developed for megacities, although their potential usefulness as planning and decision support systems, and as synthetic laboratories for trying-out ideas, hypothesizing about possible urban futures, and testing what-if scenarios has, perhaps, never been greater. In this project, we are exploring options for composing mega-models to facilitate exploration of megacities in synthetic computational environments. These options range from meta-models, loosely coupled from diverse individual simulation components, perhaps across disciplinary confines, to massively interactive and mega-scale models of megacity dynamics, built from the bottom-up. |
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Demonstrations | |
The world's megacities (you will need the Adobe Flash Player plug-in for your browser to view this movie) | |
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Eye candy | |
American megacities |
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Related groups | |
Center on Megacities, University of Southern California | |
Center for Urban Simulation and Policy Analysis, University of Washington | |
Environmental Spatial Analysis Lab, University of Michigan | |
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London | |
Center for Sustainable Cities, University of Southern California |