Wednesday, October 31, 2012

New Paper: Agent-based modeling of Slums

We have just had a  paper published in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation the entitled "Slumulation: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Slum Formations". This paper adds to the small but growing body of agent-based models exploring slums. Below is the abstract from the paper:
Slums provide shelter for nearly one third of the world's urban population, most of them in the developing world. Slumulation represents an agent-based model which explores questions such as i) how slums come into existence, expand or disappear ii) where and when they emerge in a city and iii) which processes may improve housing conditions for urban poor. The model has three types of agents that influence emergence or sustenance of slums in a city: households, developers and politicians, each of them playing distinct roles. We model a multi-scale spatial environment in a stylized form that has housing units at the micro-scale and electoral wards consisting of multiple housing units at the macro-scale. Slums emerge as a result of human-environment interaction processes and inter-scale feedbacks within our model.



This paper is a starting point for a recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant entitled "An Integrated Simulation Framework to Explore Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Slum Formation".  Moreover, anyone wanting to run or download the model can do so here.

Full reference:
Patel, A., Crooks, A.T. and Koizumi, N. (2012), Slumulation: an Agent-based Modeling Approach to Slum Formations, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 15 (4). Available at http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/15/4/2.html

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