Modelling Settlement Transformations in the EMME region

Session chairs: Dr George Artopoulos, Dr Katherine Crawford and Dr Iza Romanowska

This session invites papers that deal with the applications of computational and digital methodologies to understand settlements within the Eastern Mediterranean region, including GIS, data mining, Agent-based modelling, network analysis, spatial interaction models, and space syntax. We look for a diverse range of studies on:

• Research that questions dynamics of ancient East Mediterranean urban centres.
• Formal simulation models of a city that includes main substructures such as population dynamics, land use, economics, and interaction with the natural environment.
• Models capturing socio-environment interactions that investigate how different societies dealt with urban processes, such as population change, landscape transformation (floods, erosion, etc.) and climate change (droughts, etc.).
• Formal analysis of cities’ development over time.
• Processes involved in urban centres’ formation and abandonment.
• Ancient urban development databases.

We are especially interested in papers that adopt a comparative and diachronic perspective to studying transformation and transitions of urban and settlement systems and works that focus on the area of Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.