Events Calendar

Modeling complex urban systems

Speaker:
Dr. Paul M. Torrens, Associate Professor, School of Geographical Sciences, Arizona State UniversityAbstract:
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 modeling is at an important stage in its development. Urban simulations have, for a long time, grappled with the task of representing the rich complexity of cities as urban systems. 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 modeling methodology to remain practically relevant and diagnostically useful. In response, older technologies based on automata have been retasked as agent-based models, capable of representing massive populations of dynamic and interactive actors, behaviorally, at atomic scales and characteristic times. Such tools may serve as a next generation of urban simulation methodology, but to do so, they must be successfully proven to engage with urban theory at small scales, large scales, and those in between. Urban simulation, as a field of research, is in its relative infancy in developing the rules and heuristics that can bridge large gaps between substantive understanding of how cities work on the ground and how those rich details might be represented in simulations. Data—the dearth of which has previously had a limiting influence on urban modeling—have begun to become available in larger volumes and with greater acuity, expanding our ability to satisfy urban models' voracious appetites for ground truth. Nevertheless, small-scale data that could be mapped to agent-based models are usually in piecemeal supply and existing dataware for calibrating and validating urban models is often out of touch with agent-based approaches.
This lecture will focus on my work in developing extensible, next generation simulation tools around the concept of geosimulation as a vehicle for building detailed behaviors into urban models, as well as my efforts to build innovative forms of dataware in support of dynamic, agent-based urban modeling, using space-time Geographic Information Systems and information visualization. I will discuss the novelty and usefulness of these approaches in theorizing about urban systems at many scales, through reference to applied models of suburban sprawl, residential mobility, community-level gentrification, and small-scale crowd dynamics in dense urban settings.Biography
Dr. Paul M. Torrens is an Associate Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University and Director of its Geosimulation Laboratory. Paul is also an Affiliate in the University's Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, as well as the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation. Paul is Director of Geosimulation Labs, LLC, a research and development consultancy. His research is focused on Geographic Information Science and development of geosimulation and geocomputation tools, applied modeling of complex urban systems, and new emerging cyberspaces.
Paul holds a Ph.D. from University College London (2004), Master's degrees from Trinity College Dublin (1999) and Indiana University (1998), and a Bachelor's degree from Trinity College Dublin (1996). Paul has been an invited speaker at universities worldwide, from the University of Copenhagen and Trinity College Dublin to MIT, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has given invited lectures and seminars to industry groups as diverse as the Institute for the Future, Microsoft, and France Telecom Orange. Paul has also presented invited talks at major technology conferences, from O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference to Where 2.0. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, and the International Journal of Microsimulation. His projects have been supported by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Herberger Foundation, Science Foundation Arizona, Autodesk, Inc., and Alias Research. His research has been published widely and his work has featured in a diverse array of outlets, from Vanity Fair and Il Corriere della Sera to Forbes and Discover Magazine. His work earned him a CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2007. (See http://geosimulation.org for more details.)

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes