The world is becoming increasingly urbanized. By 2050 about 80% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities, which would need to provide living and working space while addressing inequality, housing affordability and emissions reduction challenges. Cities also need to reinforce resilience to accelerating climate-related risks. This talk will discuss the emergence of urban patterns as a result of interactions of heterogeneous adaptive agents. I present a number of spatial agent-based models ranging from simple urban economics to advanced GIS-based models. I illustrate how agent-based computational economic models can be used to study adaptation to floods accounting for the role of social interactions and risk perception biases in this process. Finally, I provide a vision on how agent-based models can be scaled up and linked to other types of models, including macro-level Integrated Assessment Models.

About the speaker

Tatiana Filatova is Professor in Computational Economic Modeling at the University of Technology Sydney and at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. Tatiana is a member-elect of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), of the Social Sciences Council of KNAW, and serves as the Associate Editor of Environmental Modelling & Software. Her research focuses on understanding aggregated consequences of individual decisions in complex adaptive social-environmental systems. Tatiana applies bottom-up computational methods to climate change economics (adaptation and mitigation), employing urban and regional spatial agent-based models and behavioural data collection. Her team explores regional impacts of households’ behavioural changes in energy use, dynamics in climate adaptation decisions to extreme events (floods, droughts), and potential changes in system resilience. This research line is distinguished by several awards including NWO VENI grant, Best Paper awards, iEMSs Early Career Excellence Award and the ERC Starting Grant. (Web: http://tatianafilatova.weebly.com/)