How we can invent--but not predict--the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan…
"A history of how computers are being used to simulate cities which in turn are increasingly being built from those same computers which are being embedded into the city's social and economic fabric"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks.In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand netw…