Emergent Properties of the Public Realm and Encroachments in the Urban Environment

The declining quality of the public realm in urban environment is a matter of concern and is found to be encroached upon in Indian cities. There is an urgent need to address this issue, and it is challenging for urban designers. Adopting an analytic framework addressing this ever-changing nature of the public realm in practice would be instrumental in improving the quality of urban life at large. The public realm in an urban environment is considered as a complex system to observe the macro-level behaviour—emergent properties which are either encouraging or discouraging for encroachments assumed to be the function of micro-level behaviour—elementary properties of interconnected and interdependent individual elements. Owing to the impossibility of experimenting with these emergent properties in the real world, an agent-based model—“Emergent Properties of Public Realm 3.1”—was developed in NetLogo 4.1.3. The typical cases representing the encroached and the un-encroached public realm were identified in the real world and experiments were conducted with varied interaction constants assumed to represent the pace of change in an urban environment. The output generated by the agent-based model was analyzed with respect to the real world.