Downtown Dynamics

In urban analytics, 'crowding' implies the spatiotemporal distributional unevenness of people's stays and flows in middle-scale urban spaces, and has since become an emerging keyword, attracting not only practical interests but  also research interests, especially in the current IoT devised downtown.This book presents a collection of papers on a series of exploratory studies on the rise and fall of downtowns (Downtown Dynamics), which the author s group has been working on with the aim of constructing an artificial society that contributes to the planning and management of crowds by developing Agent-Based Social Simulation (ABSS). In particular, the book includes (1) an analysis of 20 years worth of survey data on visitors shopping-around behavior for Osu district in Nagoya city, as a representative Japanese downtown, (2) correlation analyses of spatial distributions between Visibility Graph Analysis (VGA) as a visibility index and crowding in middle scale urban spaces, (3) agent modeling of visitors shopping-around behavior and construction of the Downtown Dynamics Model as an artificial society, and (4) modeling of the vision-driven agent as a crowd generator and its applicability to spatial design and sign layout in urban spaces.The book also includes a novel research program derived from complexity system science that provides new approaches to Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), social simulation, regional sciences, geo-informatics, and urban planning studies for researchers and graduate students, as well as planning scientists and practitioners such as town managers and planners who are concerned with downtown revitalization.