The computer game SimCity has had its day, but professional urban simulation programmes are becoming more and more advanced. The development of new towns can be charted with the aid of these programmes. The International New Town Institute (INTI) in Almere, the Netherlands, is conducting research on this. The results are presented in this book.


It seems logical that the computer is the perfect tool for designing new cities. The development of a city over time, the multitude of scenarios thinkable for each of the elements that constitute the city, these complications demand intelligent simulation applications to design and predict. Moreover, an ongoing sophistication and refinement is necessary to deal with the justified critiques on older, often extremely technocratic, simulation models.


In recent years researchers have developed sophisticated models and there is an impressive and ongoing progress in this field.


However, not all the simulation models in this book are dependant on the computer. Models that deal with decision processes or self-organization involving inhabitants can be low-tech. Simulation models, in the end, deal with human processes, they are part of a social and historical context, and they should not be autonomous projects. This is the subject of a surprising visual essay and which brings the more technocratic questions back to basics: new towns are to live in.

Conference

Yearly the INTI orgazies an international conference on new towns. All conferences result in a book published by SUN. The first book in this series is 'Model Town'. 'New Towns of the 21st Century was published in June 2010 and is the second book in the series. For more information on the INTI conferences: www.newtowninstitute.org