A systems model of the city and experiments in using it for a functional and spatial analysis of Moscow

This paper examines general principles of the approach to mathematical modelling of the urban system adopted in the authors' work on Moscow. It describes the formal model that has been constructed of spatial interactions between the city's functional subsystems, and indicates the general structure of its data base. It introduces certain quantitative indices of the urban territory that have been formulated for use in solving various town planning problems and describes some of the useful general observations that have already emerged from their application to problems of Moscow and its immediate region.