People & society
People and society: population, health, decisions and the ways people take part.
tools
The Amazon Conservation Team and the AARIMO network use Vantor satellite imagery to find and track illegal gold-mining dredges along the Puré River in the Colombian Amazon and pass the findings to enforcement agencies.
Living systemsPeople & society closed source
Knowledge graph of urban climate adaptation plans from the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech; AI agents read city plans and extract actions, hazards, outcomes and costs, each traced to its source sentence.
Cities & placesWeather & climatePeople & society partly open sourcepartly open dataAPI
AnyLogic's simulation software combines agent-based, discrete-event and system-dynamics modelling in one model, with libraries for road traffic, pedestrians and rail and the option to place models on GIS maps.
People & society closed sourceAPI
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Open-source Android app from the non-profit Awana Digital for territory monitoring and mapping, co-designed with Indigenous communities; teams record observations on a map and share them peer to peer.
People & societyCities & places open sourcepartly open participation
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Climate Interactive's global climate simulator, built with MIT Sloan and Ventana Systems; shows how choices in energy, land use and policy change emissions and temperature to 2100.
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Open-source environment for building and running spatially explicit agent-based simulations; used for urban mobility, evacuation, epidemics, climate adaptation and planning.
People & society open sourceopen participation
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Geodesignhub's hosted map-based negotiation platform; groups sketch spatial proposals, bundle them into alternatives and trade them off in facilitated sessions until they agree a plan.
People & society closed sourceAPI
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Google's family of geospatial AI models and agents, covering satellite imagery, weather, floods and population, reached through Google Earth, Earth Engine, BigQuery, Maps Platform and Google Cloud.
Cities & placesPeople & societyWeather & climateWaterEnergy partly open sourcepartly open dataAPI
Experimental Gemini-based agent from Google Research that plans a multi-step spatial analysis, calls Earth AI models and geospatial data sources, and returns the result with its plan and sources shown.
Cities & placesPeople & societyWeather & climateEnergy closed sourceAPI
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Open-source multi-agent simulation from the MiroFish team, incubated by Shanda Group; builds a population of LLM agents from a seed document such as a news report or policy draft, runs them against each other and writes a report on how the event could unfold.
People & society open sourceopen participation
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An experiment by Anselm Hook in which a machine reads the news, finds the things each story is about, decides what kinds of things they are, and lets the vocabulary of kinds and parts grow from the text; the things on a map over time, with the source code public.
People & society open sourceopen participation
Part of Google Earth AI; given a user's local outcome data such as disease rates or crop yields, it picks relevant population and satellite signals and trains models for spatial prediction, downscaling and forecasting.
People & societyFood & land closed sourceAPI
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Google Research geospatial foundation model that turns aggregated search trends, place busyness, maps, weather and air quality into an embedding vector per postal code or county, for predicting local health, economic and environmental indicators.
People & societyCities & places partly open sourcepartly open data
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Steve Coy's simulation platform for decision-making: composable causal models of a system, run faster than real time to predict the consequences of possible courses of action and pick among them.
People & society closed sourcepartly open participation
A hosted service that rates the walkability of any address from 0 to 100 from the walking distance to nearby amenities and from street measures; its companions Transit Score and Bike Score rate public transport and cycling. Scores are served through a widget and an API.
Movement & logisticsPeople & society closed sourceclosed dataAPIpartly open participation
books
A practical primer from Crooks, Malleson, Manley and Heppenstall, 2019, on building agent-based models of people in places and linking them to GIS, with worked examples in NetLogo.
Edited volume from Heppenstall, Crooks, See and Batty, 2012, collecting the foundations, methods and applications of agent-based modelling of geographic systems.
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Epstein and Axtell's 1996 Sugarscape experiments, which showed how migration, inequality, trade and conflict can grow from simple agents on a landscape; the founding book of agent-based social simulation.
James C. Scott's 1998 study of why large schemes to reorder nature and society from above have failed, and of the local knowledge their simplified maps leave out.
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The 1972 Club of Rome report by Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens that used the World3 system-dynamics model to ask whether exponential growth in population and industry could continue on a finite planet.
Michael Batty's 2013 argument that cities are flows and networks rather than fixed artefacts, with the models that follow from treating them that way.
Ben Green's 2019 argument that cities should use technology as a tool for democratic and equitable ends rather than treat it as the goal, with cases of smart-city projects gone wrong and alternatives.
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Jay Forrester's 1969 system-dynamics model of a city as feedback loops among population, housing and industry, the first computer model to simulate a whole city's life cycle.
Jay Forrester's 1971 system-dynamics model of the world as one system of population, capital, food, resources and pollution; the model behind The Limits to Growth.
terms
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The idea that a bioregion should be organised around the relationships that sustain life in a place, such as a shared water system, rather than around a boundary drawn on a map; argued by Indy Johar and related to the rights-of-nature movement for rivers.
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The aim of predictive models of land, water, law and policy that ordinary people can run, question and argue with, rather than tools reserved for planners, companies and agencies.
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Blue Green Future's accounting framework that counts living ecosystems as productive infrastructure in GDP and on sovereign balance sheets.
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A proposed social-science counterpart to Earth System Science, set out in The Anthropocene Crisis (Cambridge University Press), edited by Mathias Albert and Barry Buzan.
data sources
Community platform where people photograph plants, animals and fungi and others identify them; the observations are published as open biodiversity data for research and conservation.
Living systemsPeople & society open dataopen participation
organizations
Not-for-profit community interest company in England and Wales that turns environmental data into maps, 3D representations and installations for partners such as councils, architects and research groups.
Partnership of Commonland, Ashoka, The Weaving Lab and Wire Group, formed in March 2025 within the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, that is prototyping Bioregional Financing Facilities in three European bioregions and publishing discovery-arc papers on how such facilities should work.
questions
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How will people move through a station, a stadium or a festival, and how long would it take to clear an area in an emergency?
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What happens when several proposals or policies are combined, and how do people explore the trade-offs together?
digital twins
A sustainability simulator of the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, led by the IDEA Consortium from the University of California's Gump South Pacific Research Station; it models links between climate, environment, biodiversity and human activity across the island and its lagoon.
events
Scenario session at the Public Vitality Camp Berlin 2026, moderated by Dark Matter Labs, BiberAmt Berlin and nextlearning e.V., on governing the Berlin–Brandenburg water system across jurisdictions using measures from Berlin's Masterplan Wasser.
video channels
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Public lectures and seminars from the Santa Fe Institute on complex systems; filtered here for simulation, agent-based and scenario talks.
stories
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Scrolling story and playable water-allocation model of the Colorado River basin by Anselm Hook; readers set the flow, choose the cut rule and retire irrigation, then share the future they built as a link.
Symbol: "Meeting" by Creative Stall, Noun Project, CC BY 3.0.