Morphological similarities between DBM and an economic geography model of city growth
Résumé
An urban microeconomic model of households evolving in a 2D
cellular automata allows to simulate the growth of a metropolitan area where
land is devoted to housing, road network and agricultural/green areas. This
system is self-organised: based on individualistic decisions of economic agents
who compete on the land market, the model generates a metropolitan area with
houses, roads, and agriculture. Several simulation are performed. The results
show strong similarities with physical Dieletric breackdown models (DBM). In
particular, phase transitions in the urban morphology occur when a control
parameter reaches critical values. Population density in our model and the
electric potential in DBM play similar roles, which can explain these
resemblances.