Are French Metropolitan Areas Evolving as Self-Organizing Systems?

Denise Pumain (1) , Bertrand Roehner (2) , Lena Sanders (1) , Thérèse Saint-Julien (1)

1 GC (UMR_8504) - Géographie-cités
2 LPTHE - Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Energies

Peter Allen’s Intra-urban model is a very appealing application of bifurcation theory for simulating the evolution of an urban spatial structure. It is actually a spatial dynamic model, and it brings together many well-known empirical regularities and well-established theoretic proposals, as logistic growth, economic base theory, distance-decay functions, urban ecology and actor’s behaviour in an urban context. Until now, this model has only been tested in fictitious urban situations and did prove its ability to simulate various urban evolutions, especially of the North-American type. However, its needs to be tested in real-world situations. Main questions are : until which extent the same set of equations is able to simulate various observed urban evolution ; and how many changes in parameters’ values are necessary to reproduce observed evolution in different towns. So we tried to apply the model to a sample of French metropolitan areas.

Mots clés: cities; modeling; self-organization

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Géographie; Méthodes et statistiques

Denise Pumain, Bertrand Roehner, Lena Sanders, Thérèse Saint-Julien. Are French Metropolitan Areas Evolving as Self-Organizing Systems?. The First International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, 1983, Boston USA, United States. ⟨halshs-01488280⟩