A modified agent-based model of slum formation

Abstract

This paper investigates how the inclusion of political lifecycles and unrestricted housing development by private developers will impact the spatial arrangement and density of slums in a virtual urban environment. To do this, I build on the agent based model (ABM) entitled "Slumulation" developed by Crooks, Koizumi and Patel (2012). The intention of this is to generate conversation around the ways individual action impact the urban environment, and also how other stakeholders in the city create conditions that motivate the emergence of certain spatial arrangements over time. Through the addition of code into the original model, I am able to augment the actions of two actors in particular: politicians and developers. Borrowing from literature, I include local political cycles that minimize the interaction between urban dwellers and politicians throughout most of the simulation, except for in the case of election times where special consideration is made that allows for lower rents and lax rule enforcement in exchange for political support. In the center of this city, housing developers are programmed to build housing for high- and middle-income households because the real estate sector and government policies are encouraging the construction of a new and modern urban image that slowly prices out lower-income residents of the inner city. These additions show that local politics and development without efforts to mitigate the impact on individual households may contribute to slums, high density urban neighborhoods, and the peripheralization of the city's most vulnerable.