ABSTRACT

The aim of the CityLife model is to show how complex patterns of land use will evolve from simple behavioural rules for the strategically interdependent actors in combination with simple representations of land-use restrictions imposed by public policy agents. CityLife is a modelling framework based on a grid of cells, just like the Game of Life. In CityLife the level of attractiveness at which an activity can displace another one in a cell can be set for each combination of cells as a percentage of the value for the existing occupant. In CityLife it is perfectly permissible to allow green-space activity to compete with dwelling activity in a particular cell. It simply means that dwelling districts in the long run can be theoretically transformed into a green-space urban state. CityLife has been implemented for Apple Macintosh® as a test-bed tool for the experimental development and evaluation of various low level modelling strategies of the cellular automata kind.