Abstract

Urban models help us grasp what a city is, how it evolves and what it could be in the future. They fall into three categories: 1/ theories and ideas of how cities should be made, including urbanism and architectural planning; 2/ normative practices of city making and 3/ analytical representations built to study and simulate the structure and evolution of cities. In this talk, I reflect on this third type of urban models in two ways. First, I build on a series of seminars that I co-organise at TU-Delft Urbanism, where urban studies experts analyse classical urban models and their circulation, across geographical space and disciplinary fields. This helps understand the key contribution of classical urban models and what they can bring to contemporary research on cities. Second, I argue for a cumulative way of building geosimulation models, which builds on classical urban models and multidisciplinary theories. I present an on-going application to the modelling of urban economic segregation in the Netherlands.