A Framework for Integrated Modeling of Urban Systems

Authors

Abstract

Growth of urban population and wealth have implied an increasing demand for land in
cities worldwide with the consequent effects on land prices, equity and also lack of
efficiency in the used resources, particularly regarding time and energy. In parallel, the
demand within transport systems is following similar patterns with strong consequences for
ecology and economy.
Development of modeling tools to help the selection and design of appropriate policies is
an extremely difficult task since urban systems comprise a large and heterogeneous set of
agents that interact in different markets and time scales. Therefore, it is not surprising that
empirical studies show that the final effect of public policies in this area often contradicts
predictions. This can be attributed to methodological drawbacks in the analysis derived
from an aggregate treatment of the agents and from not integrating the different
components that interact in the urban system.
This article presents the first stage in the development of an integrated micro-simulation
model of land use, transportation, and energy for the evaluation of a range of “green
policies” aiming at enhancing sustainability and well-being. The model will eventually
include both individual/household behavior components and organization/firm behavior
components and is based on model estimation and simulation of agents’ behavior at a
micro level. The outputs of the model include aggregate energy and resource consumptions
that are combined with outputs from an aggregate system dynamics models of urban
metabolism.
The MIT-Portugal program sponsors this stage of the model system development and the
initial application will be for the city of Lisbon, Portugal.

Keywords

Urban activity models and data sensing and processing

Subject

Urban modeling

Related Project

iTEAM

Conference

ISOCARP 2009, October 2009