The New Science of Cities

The New Science of Cities PDF Author: Michael Batty
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019523
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
A proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks. In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that compose the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function. Batty presents the foundations of a new science of cities, defining flows and their networks and introducing tools that can be applied to understanding different aspects of city structure. He examines the size of cities, their internal order, the transport routes that define them, and the locations that fix these networks. He introduces methods of simulation that range from simple stochastic models to bottom-up evolutionary models to aggregate land-use transportation models. Then, using largely the same tools, he presents design and decision-making models that predict interactions and flows in future cities. These networks emphasize a notion with relevance for future research and planning: that design of cities is collective action.

The New Science of Cities

The New Science of Cities PDF Author: Michael Batty
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019523
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 519

Get Book Here

Book Description
A proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks. In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that compose the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function. Batty presents the foundations of a new science of cities, defining flows and their networks and introducing tools that can be applied to understanding different aspects of city structure. He examines the size of cities, their internal order, the transport routes that define them, and the locations that fix these networks. He introduces methods of simulation that range from simple stochastic models to bottom-up evolutionary models to aggregate land-use transportation models. Then, using largely the same tools, he presents design and decision-making models that predict interactions and flows in future cities. These networks emphasize a notion with relevance for future research and planning: that design of cities is collective action.

The New Science of Cities

The New Science of Cities PDF Author: Michael Batty
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262534568
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
A proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks. In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that compose the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function. Batty presents the foundations of a new science of cities, defining flows and their networks and introducing tools that can be applied to understanding different aspects of city structure. He examines the size of cities, their internal order, the transport routes that define them, and the locations that fix these networks. He introduces methods of simulation that range from simple stochastic models to bottom-up evolutionary models to aggregate land-use transportation models. Then, using largely the same tools, he presents design and decision-making models that predict interactions and flows in future cities. These networks emphasize a notion with relevance for future research and planning: that design of cities is collective action.

Introduction to Urban Science

Introduction to Urban Science PDF Author: Luis M. A. Bettencourt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262366436
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A novel, integrative approach to cities as complex adaptive systems, applicable to issues ranging from innovation to economic prosperity to settlement patterns. Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, integrative approach to understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, claiming that they require us to frame the field of urban science in a way that goes beyond existing theory in such traditional disciplines as sociology, geography, and economics. He explores the processes facilitated by and, in many cases, unleashed for the first time by urban life through the lenses of social heterogeneity, complex networks, scaling, circular causality, and information. Though the idea that cities are complex adaptive systems has become mainstream, until now those who study cities have lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding cities and urbanization, for generating useful and falsifiable predictions, and for constructing a solid body of empirical evidence so that the discipline of urban science can continue to develop. Bettencourt applies his framework to such issues as innovation and development across scales, human reasoning and strategic decision-making, patterns of settlement and mobility and their influence on socioeconomic life and resource use, inequality and inequity, biodiversity, and the challenges of sustainable development in both high- and low-income nations. It is crucial, says Bettencourt, to realize that cities are not "zero-sum games" and that knowledge, human cooperation, and collective action can build a better future.

Urban Ecology

Urban Ecology PDF Author: Richard T. T. Forman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107007003
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
The first richly illustrated worldwide portrayal of urban ecology, tying together organisms, built structures, and the physical environment around cities.

Order without Design

Order without Design PDF Author: Alain Bertaud
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262550970
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities’ development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners’ dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities’ productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age PDF Author: Annalee Newitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039365267X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

Modeling Cities and Regions as Complex Systems

Modeling Cities and Regions as Complex Systems PDF Author: Roger White
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262029561
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
The theory and practice of modeling cities and regions as complex, self-organizing systems, presenting widely used cellular automata-based models, theoretical discussions, and applications. Cities and regions grow (or occasionally decline), and continuously transform themselves as they do so. This book describes the theory and practice of modeling the spatial dynamics of urban growth and transformation. As cities are complex, adaptive, self-organizing systems, the most appropriate modeling framework is one based on the theory of self-organizing systems—an approach already used in such fields as physics and ecology. The book presents a series of models, most of them developed using cellular automata (CA), which are inherently spatial and computationally efficient. It also provides discussions of the theoretical, methodological, and philosophical issues that arise from the models. A case study illustrates the use of these models in urban and regional planning. Finally, the book presents a new, dynamic theory of urban spatial structure that emerges from the models and their applications. The models are primarily land use models, but the more advanced ones also show the dynamics of population and economic activities, and are integrated with models in other domains such as economics, demography, and transportation. The result is a rich and realistic representation of the spatial dynamics of a variety of urban phenomena. The book is unique in its coverage of both the general issues associated with complex self-organizing systems and the specifics of designing and implementing models of such systems.

Urban Systems Design

Urban Systems Design PDF Author: Yoshiki Yamagata
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128162937
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era shows how to design, model and monitor smart communities using a distinctive IoT-based urban systems approach. Focusing on the essential dimensions that constitute smart communities energy, transport, urban form, and human comfort, this helpful guide explores how IoT-based sharing platforms can achieve greater community health and well-being based on relationship building, trust, and resilience. Uncovering the achievements of the most recent research on the potential of IoT and big data, this book shows how to identify, structure, measure and monitor multi-dimensional urban sustainability standards and progress. This thorough book demonstrates how to select a project, which technologies are most cost-effective, and their cost-benefit considerations. The book also illustrates the financial, institutional, policy and technological needs for the successful transition to smart cities, and concludes by discussing both the conventional and innovative regulatory instruments needed for a fast and smooth transition to smart, sustainable communities. - Provides operational case studies and best practices from cities throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and Africa, providing instructive examples of the social, environmental, and economic aspects of "smartification - Reviews assessment and urban sustainability certification systems such as LEED, BREEAM, and CASBEE, examining how each addresses smart technologies criteria - Examines existing technologies for efficient energy management, including HEMS, BEMS, energy harvesting, electric vehicles, smart grids, and more

Cities and Nature

Cities and Nature PDF Author: Lisa Benton-Short
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134252749
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Cities and Nature illustrates how the city is part of the environment, and how it is subject to environmental constraints and opportunities. The city has been treated in geographical writings as only a social phenomena, and at the same time, environmental scientists have tended to ignore the urban. This book reconnects the science and social science through the examination of the urban. It critiques the dominant academic discourse which ignores the environmental base of urban life and living, and discusses the urban natural environment and how this is subjected to social influences. The book is organized around three central themes: urban environment in historical context issues in urban-nature relations realigning urban-nature relations. Ideas such as pollution as a physical environmental fact, often created or impacted by economic, cultural and political changes are discussed, as well as viewing pollution as a social act: consuming patterns of everyday activities - driving, showering, shopping, eating - and how this has an environmental impact. The authors reintroduce a social science perspective in examining urban nature, the city and its physical environment. Cities and Nature clearly illustrates the physical and social elements of the urban environment and shows how these are important to examining the city. It includes further reading and boxed case studies on Bangladesh, Paris, Delhi, Rome, Cubatao, Thailand, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Toronto. This book would be an asset to students and researchers in environmental studies, urban studies and planning.

The Structure and Dynamics of Cities

The Structure and Dynamics of Cities PDF Author: Marc Barthelemy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107109175
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Presents a modern and interdisciplinary perspective on cities that combines new data with tools from statistical physics and urban economics.