The Chaotic, Fractal and Complex City

Agent-based modeling (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) holds potential for modeling urban phenomena. However, there are some significant inter-operability problems preventing it going beyond theoretical or isolated applications. A real link needs to be made between these models and a GIS. One of the basic problems is that GIS is static and these techniques are dynamic. While ABM and CA can model complex and chaotic phenomena, a spatial data interface is necessary so that these modeling methods can go beyond theoretical to application. I would appreciate any comments on this topic.

We are now accepting papers for the Spring 2007 volume of Urbana . Papers concerning any aspect of urbanism are welcome. The submission g uidelines are listed at: http://www.tamuk.edu/geo/Urbana/ . Please submit your manuscripts to either Dr. Jesus Trevino at: jtrevino41@hotmail.com or Dr. Michael A. McAdams at mcadams@fatih.edu.tr

The link above will take you directly to the new issue of Urbana for Autumn 2006. The articles are very diverse and of high quality, as is the tradition of the journal. If you have any comments, I would be very willing to post them ,if they are appropriate, on this blog. You can also send them to the urbana blog at: http://journalurbana.blogspot.com/. We will be coming out with a new issue in Spring. There is a possibility of a special issue perhaps later on this year related to the Global Cities confenence depending on the number of articles received. We welcome anyone who is a academician or researcher in the area of urbanism (which is a very broad area) to submit your articles.

I was doing some searching and landed on this site (click above link.) There are a whole group of articles on morality and New Urbanism. I am in the process of reading the articles and will post further comments, if appropriate. I would welcome any readers of my blog, which apparently is just a few persons, to read these set of articles and post your responses. If you would like to expand your argument into a full paper, please keep Urbana in mind as a possible place for publication.

I presented a paper at the Global Cities 2006 conferenece held in Liverpool on29-30 June 2006. The link for the conference is at: http://hopelive.hope.ac.uk/mahumanities/GolbalCities/index.htm . Go to the above title link to review a draft of the paper or download it at: http://geocities.com/mmcadams_fatih/culturecities.doc  My PowerPoint Presentation can be downloaded at: http://geocities.com/mmcadams_fatih/culturecities.ppt  Any comments are welcome.

I recently presented a paper concerning my thoughts on the Information Age-High Technology City (IAHTC) at the Crossing Borders-Building Bridges Transdisciplinary-American Studies Conference on 25-27 May 2006 held in Istanbul, Turkey Istanbul is at the crossroads of East and West so this is a most appropriate place to hold this conference. Utopian ideas are a means to build bridges to another future. The paper is an expansion of the previous blog. You can view the entire paper by clicking on the link for this blog. I would appreciate any comments. Hopefully, this paper will be published in the near future.

Many cities are aspiring to be a World Class, Creative (1), Global (3), High Technology or an Information City. While these terms can be considered theoretical constructs, they can also be seen as utopian ideals. The promise of the transformation of the declining Industrial City to a High Technology City or the achieving of any of the other classifications (i.e., World Class City) is beneficial to a relatively small group of any urban population (e.g. bourgeois). The unemployed, working urban poor and the under-employed are not inspired by the same vision. In fact, the persual of the realization of these types of cities could be leading to further urban despair. Academia has devoted numerous articles and books related to these topics mostly relating to an attempt to categorize and describe them. What is missing is a discussion on how this will benefit those that are not part of the new bourgeois. This plethora of terms and conceptual models to describe the emerging new urban forms are ...