The growth, accretion, and decay of cities

The decision analysis way of thinking, including the notions of state and motion in state-space, is used to analyze the evolution of a city over decades of time and in response to a stream of decisions made by local government and others. Due to the numerous and complex interactions between the variables that characterize a city, we focus on a subsystem, or bipole, consisting of land use and transportation. We postulate five city structures with greatly differing population densities and transportation solutions, ranging from traditional pedestrian-friendly to auto-dependent sprawl. The dependent variables (including cost to the city, residents' livability, pollution, and others) are simulated with the help of the popular computer game SimCity 2000.