EIDOS of a city: simulating the collapse and resilience of ancient Eastern Mediterranean urban environments via agent-based modelling

EIDOS, an EU-funded interdisciplinary project, will expand the research communities’ perception of the mechanisms that contributed to the transformations of cities in the network of urban habitats of the Eastern Mediterranean. EIDOS will address important questions concerning the phenomenon of urbanisation: why do some cities fold at the first sign of turmoil while others, seemingly similar, thrive? What are the dynamic, emergent and complex interactions between growing and de-territorialised (dying) cities within a meshwork of urban environments, from antiquity to early modern times? What components of an ancient city enabled it to be incorporated into cities of later periods, sometimes spanning to modern times? By combining historical and archaeological data with recent advances in computational simulation methods, EIDOS will significantly add to our understanding of past urban resilience.