Abstract
Urban villages are specific urban formations that emerged in many Chinese cities, caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization in the past four decades of economic boom. Originating from rural villages, their transformation hints an interesting discrepancy between top-down policy and its informal understanding and implementation by the individual actors or organizations in the village. This paper investigates the formation process of urban villages and explores potential interventions that could be implemented in the villages to improve their conditions. This thesis will use Agent-based Modelling tools to experiment and simulate the possible impacts of proposed incremental changes on the villages. Agent-based modelling is a powerful simulation modelling technique that has seen may real-world applications. In agent-based modelling (ABM), a system is modelled as a collection of autonomous decision-making entities called agents, in the context of this thesis, could be the inhabitants of affected personals. Each agent individually assesses its situation and makes decisions based on a set of rules, which could be our proposed incremental changes. Agents may execute various behaviours appropriate for the system they represent. The level of influence of each rules (implementations) will vary based on research data aforehand. The simulation results will be used to prove if our predicted scenario will happen if the proposed measures are implemented.