U4IA: Emerging urban futures and opportune repertoires of individual adaptation: program overview

This paper summarizes the goals and scope of a new large scale research project, funded by the EEC. The ultimate goal of this research project is to develop the first comprehensive model of dynamic activity-travel patterns in the world, expanding and integrating concepts and partial approaches that have been suggested over the last few years. Dynamics pertain to different time horizons. Long-term decisions such as demographic change, changing job or house may also prompt or force people to adapt their activity-travel patterns. Exogenously triggered change involves change in the urban and/or transportation environment and/or the larger socio-economic institutional contexts. It may be unplanned or planned (policies). The integrated multi-agent model will simulate the primary, secondary and higher order effects of such emerging urban futures on dynamic repertoires of activity-travel patterns. A multi-agent model will be build to capture these dynamics. In addition to the multi-agent model, the PhD/postdoc projects will result in improved understanding of the effects of various policies, based on a variety of statistical analyses, and in guidelines about the most effective (set of) policies in contributing to integrated urban sustainability, and in elaborated theory about spatial dynamic choice behaviour.