Simulations for Innovative Mechanisms for the Self-Organizing City: Testing New Tools for Value Capturing

Duration: 09/14 - 08/17

The existence of policies aimed at, or for, cities is common to most governments the world over. However, in recent times the whole business model upon which urban policy has proceeded for decades in most Western settings has been called into question. As a result, in some contexts traditional state-led attempts to effect urban regeneration have begun to be replaced by policy designed by coalitions of self-assembled actors.

In this respect the nations of North West Europe stand out as being especially advanced, particularly with respect to making legal space for self-determined consortia of non-state actors, such as businesses and citizens, to collectively devise and implement urban policy. In parallel to these radical changes in how such countries organise their policies for cities, researchers have begun to find significant explanatory power in game theory, behavioural and experimental economics to understand everything from policy design and implementation through to the early impacts of self-organised urban transformation.

Simulations for Innovative Mechanisms for the Self-Organizing City: Testing New Tools for Value Capturing seeks to advance this approach to investigate the potential impacts of self-organised urban policy across four nations that have pioneered self-organisation in urban policy: the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway.

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