ABSTRACT
There are many ways of representing cities that range from focussing on tangible physical form such as their buildings, infrastructures and terrain to more abstract conceptions that consider cities in terms of the spatial distribution of their populations and socio-economic attributes. Generic issues such as energy use and flow, climate change and social equity cut across these representations, offering different ways of understanding their impact that are reflected in different scientific styles and different methods of forecasting. In this chapter, we examine the implications for energy flow and change with respect to how people travel, from work to home primarily, which leads directly to questions about the form of cities in terms of energy costs that different morphologies incur. We begin with a review of the different elements of this representation and then illustrate a typical model of residential location that offers a generic template for many kinds of interactions that involve flows of people and uses of energy in their transport. We develop this model for four different modes of transport in the Greater London region and illustrate its operation with respect to the impact of a doubling of the cost of travel. This enables us to focus on population and mode shifts that occur as energy costs change. We then show how this model is nested within a wider framework of integrated assessment that contains models that change in scale from the regional to the site specific. We finally illustrate how our own model is used within this framework to assess the impact of sea level rise and flooding in the Greater London region as part of the debate about longer-term climate change.
