Cellular Automata Urban Model

A cellular automata (CA) urban model simulates the growth and transformation of cities by dividing space into a grid of cells, each holding a land-use state, and letting those states evolve through local transition rules that depend on the states of neighbouring cells. Introduced for urban form by Roger White and Guy Engelen in 1993 and popularized in Michael Batty's work on cities as complex systems, the approach reproduces realistic, fractal urban patterns from simple bottom-up rules rather than top-down equations. It has become a workhorse for exploring how compact or sprawling settlement patterns emerge from neighbourhood-scale interactions under regional land demand.