Cities across the globe are experiencing rapid growth due to various factors such as natural population growth, urbanization, and immigration. The current global population of 8 billion is expected to increase to 10 billion by 2050, with most growth anticipated to happen in urban settings. Such rapid expansion often creates both challenges and opportunities. The challenges stem from the need to ensure that various city services are expanded at a pace to meet the growing demands of this expanding population and that both growth and development proceed in an orderly and sustainable manner.

In this project, we developed the City Dynamics framework to address the intricacies between demand and supply of cities’ infrastructures under the influence of multiple driving factors such as cultural norms, environment, and demographics on various city systems such as land use, transportation, energy, and ICT infrastructures. The project goal was to capture and quantify the implications of patterns within the general drivers on its infrastructure as well as the intricacies between city systems and to enable government, planners, and even private businesses to develop their plans based on a better and more holistic understanding of urban environments.