Abstract
Advances in agent-based modelling have led to theoretically-grounded spatial agent models of urban dynamics, capturing the dynamics of population, property prices, and regeneration. We leverage our extant agent-based model founded on the rent-gap theory, as a lens to study the effect of sizeable refugee migration in an abstracted model of a densely-populated Mediterranean city. Our exploratory work provides the foundation for calibration with real data, and offers a step towards a tool for policy makers asking what-if questions about the urban environment in the context of migration.
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Notes
- 1.
Experiments show that larger abstract grid sizes yield the same observed dynamics, considering also that all the parameters are held proportional.
- 2.
We do not consider other refugee populations, including those of Palestinian origin.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous reviewers of the ABMUS 2016 workshop for their constructive comments, and the participants at the workshop for discussions. We thank Joseph Bechara, Bruce Edmonds, Mona Fawaz, Alison Heppenstall, and Ali Termos. This work was partially funded by the University Research Board of the American University of Beirut under grant number 103183.
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Picascia, S., Yorke-Smith, N. (2017). Towards an Agent-Based Simulation of Housing in Urban Beirut. In: Namazi-Rad, MR., Padgham, L., Perez, P., Nagel, K., Bazzan, A. (eds) Agent Based Modelling of Urban Systems. ABMUS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10051. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51957-9_1
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