Cities as they could be: Artificial Life and Urban Systems

Abstract: The metaphor of cities as organisms has a long history in urban planning, and a few urban modeling approaches have explicitly been linked to Artificial Life. We propose in that paper to explore the extent of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence application to urban issues, by constructing and exploring a citation network of around 225,000 papers. It shows that most of the literature is indeed application of methodologies and a rather strong modularity of approaches. We finally develop ALife concepts which have a strong potential for the development of new urban theories.