Abstract for: Economic Dynamics for Smarter Cities

The economy is studied at all scales, from micro to macro. With global trends toward rapid urbanization, one abstracted scale of the economy will become increasingly important to understand, that of a city economy. Working in close cooperation with the urban planning staff of a US city, the authors developed a system dynamics model of a city as a complex, adaptive, system of system. The economy sector of the model is distinguished by its incorporation of the city’s highly porous boundaries and unification of multiple definitional approaches to the key measure of City Gross Domestic Product. The result is a “system thinking” tool for policy makers to explore the relationships between citywide, policy-initiated changes and the structurally determined performance of the city economy.