---
id: books/cities-and-complexity
about:
  label: Cities and Complexity
  description: >-
    Michael Batty's 2005 account of modelling cities with cellular automata,
    agent-based models and fractals, the bottom-up methods under much of today's
    urban simulation.
  tags:
    - cities
    - cellular automata
    - agent-based
    - fractals
    - simulation
  depiction: cover.jpg
book:
  authors:
    - Michael Batty
  publisher: MIT Press
  year: 2005
  isbn: '9780262025836'
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5040453W'
domains:
  - places
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: >-
        Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata,
        Agent ... - Michael Batty - Google Books
      url: 'https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780262025836'
    - title: 'Open Library: Cities and complexity'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5040453W'
  created: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Batty sets urban dynamics inside complexity theory and shows, with worked models, how many simple interacting processes add up to the organised whole of a city. He argues that planning has been moving from top-down control to bottom-up explanation, that bottom-up processes have outcomes that cannot be predicted in detail, and that fractal geometry and nonlinear dynamics are the tools suited to them. The early chapters build cities from cellular automata, where change comes from the local rules of simple cells; later ones move to agents and to the fractal structure of urban form. The paperback appeared in 2007.

For a builder it is the textbook on the family of methods, cellular automata, agent-based models, fractal growth, that most place-scale simulations draw on, with the reasoning for why those methods fit cities and what they cannot be expected to deliver.

Cover via Open Library.