Towards A Theoretical Model of Urban Growth

Abstract

"The overwhelming trend is for urban areas to grow. The challenge is to accentuate the positive impacts of this growth (innovation, art, wealth, etc) while mitigating the negative burdens (crime, pollution, poverty, loss of biodiversity, etc). However, this challenge is complicated by the interconnected physical, biological and social issues. There are several studies on just one aspect of this problem, but we propose a more encompassing approach by looking at the interplay between institutions and ecological processes (topography, economics, etc) using both computational and analytical (mathematical equations) approaches. We used simplified equations to build an intuition towards a more comprehensive modeling framework."