Goldstein, Noah C.. 2000. Do cities learn from getting burned?

Alife Conference. Portland, Oregon. September.

Abstract

Human settlements have always been effected by natural disasters. Our awareness of these events is usually that of something "happening" to the city. The fact that the city is changing the agent of disaster is left out of that awareness. I argue that many disasters fire in particular, have co-evolved with cities over time. The perspective I am taking is that the city is an organism that can grow in ideal situations and can shrink in a disaster. Wildfire too can be viewed as an organism, one that usually lies in stasis until the ideal conditions, then quickly grows and dies. Both entities compete for space and resources. One entities' behavior will impact the other, and over time the systems co-evolve. This co-evolution beckons the question, what observable emergent properties emerge from this co-evolution? Does the city learn from the wildfires, and does the fire-adapted landscape change its behavior as a result of city growth? Through the use of modeling we can gain a better understanding of these disasters and the process of urban growth. I propose to examine the use of a coupled urban-wildfire cellular automaton (CA) based model to examine the emergent behavior of the two-process system. Questions of the appropriateness of modeling are explored as well as the possible conclusions which could be drawn from these experiments.