Simple Agents, Complex Emergent City: Agent-Based Modeling of Intraurban Migration - Computational Approaches for Urban Environments - page 119

Chapter 6
Simple Agents, Complex Emergent City:
Agent-Based Modeling of Intraurban Migration
Shipeng Sun and Steven M. Manson
Abstract Intraurban migration—residential movement within a metropolitan
area—defines the nature of urbanization. Housing location decision making is
a complex process driven by the interactions between the housing market and
home searchers. Researchers have paid much attention to the environmental,
socioeconomic, cultural, and policy features of housing markets. In contrast,
housing search has been relatively neglected due to challenges of theory,
methodology, and data. This article addresses these challenges by presenting
an agent-based model of intraurban migration featuring straightforward and
empirically specified rules for housing search. This model is calibrated and
validated against real-world housing vacancies and relocation origin-destination
pairs extracted from parcel records for the Twin Cities of Minnesota, USA, for
2005-2007. Drawing on these unique data sidesteps a long-standing issue, the
prohibitive costs of identifying, recording, and quantifying housing search activities
for an entire metropolitan region. Conceptually, this model updates geographic
theories of intraurban migration that focus on intervening opportunities and spatial
bias. It also methodologically advances the agent-based modeling of urbanization
with a high-resolution, empirically specified model that demonstrates how urban
pattern emerges from simple rules and interactions. Overall, the model demonstrates
that relatively straightforward housing search rules can simulate realistic patterns of
intraurban migration.
Keywords Intraurban migration ￿ Agent-based modeling ￿ Housing search ￿
Housing locational decisions