Artificial planning experience by means of a heuristic cell-space model: simulating international migration in the urban process

The authors suggest considering the city as a complex, open, and thus self-organized system, and describing it by means of a cell-space model. A central property of self-organizing systems is that they are not controllable. The city, in this respect, is complex and untamable. Inability to recognize and accept this property is one of the reasons for the difficulties and problems of modernist town planning. The theory and model presented are built to describe the urban process as a historical one in which, given identical initial conditions, each simulation run is unique and never fully repeats itself. From the point of view of urban policy and planning, the heuristic model can guide decisionmakers by answering the following question: "given the initial conditions of an inflow of new immigrants (that is, from the ex-USSR), what possible urban scenarios can result, and what are their global structural properties?'. -Authors