Call for participation - A Full-Day Tutorial on Modeling Urban Complexity and Hierarchy

[NordGISci Coordinator]

A Full-Day Tutorial on Modeling Urban Complexity and Hierarchy
(on June 23, 2011, in conjunction with GeoInformatics 2011, June
24-26, 2011, Shanghai, China)
http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/tutorial/

This tutorial will introduce a range of complexity modeling tools to
assess urban complexity and hierarchy in order to better understand
urban structure and dynamics. These tools are drawn from complexity
study and include fractal, scaling, universality, agent-based
modeling, complex networks and allometry. Both instructors have been
working on modeling urban complexity and hierarchy for many years. It
is intended to draw examples from their research and package them
together as a full-day tutorial. On the one hand, we will provide a
state of the art of the development and key concepts in complexity
study to deal with real world problems across different disciplines.
On the other hand, we will take cities as a typical complex system,
and assess them from a complexity perspective and using massive
geographic information assembled.

We will present a set of software tools that can help explore massive
geographic information about cities to uncover underlying patterns,
structures and regularities. We will show how current date-intensive
computing provides a new means to explore urban complexity and
hierarchy. In particular, we will look at two examples of massive
data: (1) human movement trajectories captured by GPS receivers,
flights, and mobile phones, and (2) emerging volunteered geographic
information like OpenStreetMap and Flickr. The tutorial participants
will be provided a complete version of free data and source codes that
can be further used after the tutorial for research and education
purposes.

Learning objectives
• To introduce various complexity modeling tools such as fractal,
scaling, universality, agent-based modeling, and network theories
• To study urban complexity and hierarchy using the complexity
tools and based on increasingly available geographic information

Scope of the tutorial
• An overview of complexity study: development and key concepts
• Introduction to self-organized cities, esp., fractal cities,
chaotic cities, sandpile cities
• Scaling and power laws, esp., allometry, 1/f noise, Zipf’s law
and Pareto distributions
• Emergence in urban evolution, including the emergence processes
of fractal patterns, chaotic attractors, localization, and symmetry
breaking
• Complex network theories and modeling large geographic networks
• Cellular automata and agent-based modeling of urban and regional
systems

Target Audience Information
PhD students or fresh PhD holders in geography or geographic
information science (limited to 30 seats)

Prerequisite knowledge of audience
Intended audience must have a basic understanding of geography and
cartography, and be familiar with fundamental concepts and techniques
of geographic information systems.

Instruction languages
Bilingual (Chinese and English)

Instructors
Bin Jiang
Division of Geomatics, KTH Research School
University of Gävle, SE-801 76 Gävle, Sweden
Email: bin....@hig.se

Yanguang Chen
School of Urban and Environmental Sciences
Peking University, Beijing, China
Email: che...@pku.edu.cn

Recommended readings:
Albeverio S, Andrey D, Giordano P, and Vancheri A (editors, 2008) The
Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems: An interdisciplinary approach,
Physica-Verlag: Heidelberg.
Allen P. M. (1997), Cities and Regions as Self-organizing Systems:
models of complexity, Gorgon and Breach Science Publishers: New York.
Batty M, and Longley P. (1994), Fractal Cities: A geometry of form and
function. Academic Press: London.
Batty M. (2005), Cities and Complexity: understanding cities with
cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals, The MIT Press:
Cambridge, MA.
Bertuglia C. S., Bianchi G. and Mela A. (editors, 1998), The City and
Its Sciences, Physica-Verlag: Heidelberg.
Chen Y. (2008), Fractal Urban Systems: Scaling, Symmetry and Spatial
Complexity (in Chinese), Science Press: Beijing.
Jia T. and Jiang B. (2011), Measuring urban sprawl based on massive
street nodes and the novel concept of natural cities, Preprint,
arxiv.org/abs/1010.0541
Jiang B. and Yao X. (editors, 2010), Geospatial Analysis and Modeling
of Urban Structure and Dynamics, Springer: Berlin
Jiang B. (2010), Scaling of geographic space and its implications, A
position paper presented at Las Navas 20th Anniversary Meeting on
Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space, Las Navas del
Marques, Avila, Spain, July 5 - 9, 2010.
Jiang B. and Jia T. (2011), Zipf's law for all the natural cities in
the United States: a geospatial perspective, International Journal of
Geographical Information Science, x, xx-xx, Preprint, arxiv.org/abs/
1006.0814.
Jiang B. and Liu X. (2011), Scaling of geographic space from the
perspective of city and field blocks and using volunteered geographic
information, Preprint, arxiv.org/abs/1009.3635.
Portugali J (editor, 2006), Complex Artificial Environments:
Simulation, Cognition and VR in the Study and Planning of Cities,
Springer: Berlin.
Portugali J. (2000), Self-Organization and the City, Springer: Berlin.
Pumain D. (2006), Hierarchy in Natural and Social Sciences, Springer:
Dordrecht.