Introducing, Blocktown - a synthetic city

Written on November 12th, 2020 by James

Over the coming weeks/months/years(?) I’ll be building Blocktown, a synthetic city.

Blocktown will be a computer model of a city. The model will synthesise a resident population and will simulate the city’s transport and land use systems (both supply and demand sides) at various states. It will be incrementally developed to one day model individual Blocktownians, but may start off at an aggregate (spatially grouped) level initially.

Blocktown will be used as a model of how urban systems settle at (semi)equilibrium states. It’s purpose is purely for my own diversion and interest. I hope to build many elements from the ground up, for example, I hope to build my own network minimum path algorithm based on the classic Dijkstra algorithm for transport cost calculation and route choice building. Model inputs and results will be visualised here on my website using various web-based interactive visualisation platforms (e.g. d3.js).

The idea is that over time, little by little, Blocktown will take shape and evolve into a truly synthetic city.

Below in the figure is a map of Blocktown’s 99 city zones and their dominant land uses according to Blocktown City Hall’s planning overlays. The next post will outline Blocktown’s transport network.

Figure: Blocktown city zones and predominant land uses