ABSTRACT
Urban simulations are an important toolkit for theorizing about cities, testing ideas and hypotheses, and evaluating plans and policies. As a field of research, urban modelling is at an important stage in its development. The pace of urbanization and city growth, and the ever-increasing rate of adaptation of urban phenomena, have, to some extent, accelerated beyond the abilities of previous generations of modelling methodology to remain practically relevant and diagnostically useful. These challenges are particularly significant for urban models tasked with representing the dynamics of the world’s megacities, which manifest among the most complicated and complex human-environmental systems. A next-generation of urban modelling is perhaps needed to conceptualize the dynamics of the world’s megacities, which are, in many instances, growing in number, size, and influence at unprecedented rates.
