---
id: media/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
relations:
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/michael-batty
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](/people/michael-batty/) places 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. Bottom-up processes, in his account, have outcomes that cannot be predicted in detail. Fractal geometry (shapes that repeat at many scales) and nonlinear dynamics are the tools he finds suited to such processes.

The early chapters build cities from cellular automata: grids of simple cells whose change comes from local rules. Later chapters move to agents, individual actors each following their own rules, and to the fractal structure of urban form. Most place-scale simulations draw on this family of methods. The book gives the reasoning for why they fit cities and what they cannot be expected to deliver. The paperback appeared in 2007.

Cover via Open Library.