A complex system approach to urban planning and development

Abstract

There has been a remarkable increasing in the amount of stored data by private and public companies about urban systems. On one hand, these huge amounts of data enable a detailed historical review of the processes under investigation; on the other hand, this excess of data makes harder to extract summarized information and also to make good decisions supported by well-established empirical facts. Cities are complex systems in which the equations governing their dynamics depend on several social, economical, and environmental factors. A theory explaining how these attributes of cities influence cities performance would help to inform urban planning and development. It is clear that this is a timely and on the rise theme with many challenges that deserve attention from scientific community. In order to understand, investigate and extract patterns from cities, researchers usually need a wide range of skills such as those from Statistical Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. In the course of this project, we intend to investigate several aspects of urban systems by employing the Statistical Physics and omputer Science framework. Specifically, the problems that must be addressed in this project are: i) The role of commuters in urban scaling; ii) Long-term migrations and its effects on urban scaling; iii) What are the mechanism that generate the fluctuations in the scaling laws? iv) How does population density affect urban indicators? v) Can the spread of crime be modelled by epidemic models? vi) Modelling urban systems via complex networks and multilayer networks. We believe that these studies may have potential applications in the allocation of new policies and resource in the context of urban planning and development. (AU)