Summary For informed decision making about the current state and near future of any city, it is important to consider the long‐term resource use trajectory and legacy of its past. Such information is not always readily available. Urban metabolism analysis for any given time period can be challenging due to the lack of metropolitan‐ or city‐level data, and reconstructing a time series of urban energy or material flows is seldom...

Summary Systems dynamics, cellular automata, agent‐based modeling, and network analyses have been used in population, land use, and transport planning models. An overview of complex systems science as applied to urban development is presented, and examples are given of where the problems of housing people and anticipating their movements have been addressed with complex approaches, sometimes in concert with deterministic, larg...