Simulating the dynamics between the development of creative industries and urban spatial structure: an agent-based model

Creative industries have been widely adopted to promote economy growth, urban regeneration and innovation. It is expected that this strategy can produce a sustainable development model. However, in reality it is not effective enough because the implemented policy based on linear analysis is misleading. This chapter aims to fill this gap by examining the dynamics among creative industries, urban land space and urban government from a complex systems’ view. It presents a general simulation framework and an agent-based model (named “CID-USST”) developed in NetLogo. This is a spatially explicit model where a simplified urban space is used to represent the real urban land space. The agents involved include the creative firms, the creative workers, and the urban government. The resulting urban spatial structure is examined from two aspects: the spatial density distribution and the spatial clustering pattern of both the creative firms and the creative workers.