Tyche: An Analyst-Centered Tool with Models for Understanding Political Development in Dense Urban Environments

Over half of the world’s population lives in urban environments. These areas will continue to grow and become denser over time. This rapid growth presents several challenges to analysts who seek to understand urban areas across a variety of dimensions, including political development and the crises that emerge when political development falters. The journal article, “Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Sociocultural Factors of Dense Urban Spaces” describes six networks that influence political development in dense urban environments. With the modern-day prevalence of data and availability of computational power, there is an opportunity to develop models of political development and populate those models with data to provide near real-time insights into the dynamics of dense urban environments. We propose to describe two functional systems, transportation and social systems, and three networks, allocation, legitimacy, and participation, using an approach that integrates system dynamics models and probabilistic models to provide resilience when objective data is not possible to retrieve. Our approach also includes the design of novel sensors to collect data for the models, evaluation of models’ accuracy, technical demonstration, and identification of directions for future work towards Tyche: An Analyst-Centered Tool with Models for Understanding Political Development in Dense Urban Environments.