The Identification and Simulation of the Urban Spatio-temporal Dynamic. The Case Study of Rome

According to Tobler (1979), the identification problem can be formulated in the following way: "Given 20 pictures in order, of the board positions from a game of chess, determine the rules of chess". Unfortunately, there is a far more limited number of urban data available compared to the information that can be extracted from a game of chess. In fact some of the relevant characteristics of available data for urban analysis are:

• time series are limited and usually only a few temporal periods are available; • the lag between two periods is too large in relation to the temporal causation

of the urban phenomena.