See the short summary in Planetizen on IBM's first customer, the City of Portland, Oregon, for its Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities app.
Also, see also the full story in Fast Company's IBM Partners With Portland To Play SimCity For Real.
Although the
. . . conclusions are only as good as the data and the models (patents equal innovation) he has to work with. This problem--if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it--combined with the impulse to improve cities by models, is driving bothIBM’s “smarter city” strategy and the nascent “urban systems” movement, which seek to apply complexity science to cities. IBM sponsored the first Urban Systems Symposium in May (where West co-starred in a show-stopping discussion with Paul Romer and Stewart Brand).
“While other analytical approaches rely on breaking a problem down into smaller and smaller pieces, the model we've created recognizes that the behavior of a system as a whole can be different from what might be anticipated by looking at its parts,” Michael Littlejohn, vice president of strategy for Smarter Cities at IBM."
The Problem with Managing by Measuring: Even so, as Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted."
The Essential Problem: Creating the Future Anew vs Tweaking the Problem. Although i think urban system modelling has a lot of potential if harnessed with urban system building, particularly if it goes in the direction of modular systems growth, the problem with such modelling efforts is that they substitute acquiescence to past trends for the power of creating a desired future anew, which will likely involve new variables and functional relationships that have not existed in the past. The data and modeling might shed light on these components of the future, but not in the historic form that would be typically modelled. Thus, the challenge is one of informing the creation of a desired future with modeling of past systems configurations vs simply replicating the past as the future, slightly tweaked. It will be interesting to see how this renewed interest in urban systems unfolds.