Mechanicity: Future Cities

My European Research Council (ERC) grant comes to an end in 3 months time. You can hear me talk about the project courtesy of an ERC podcast by clicking here but in this post I will tell you what the project is about. It is about developing what myself and others call a science of cities, a new science in some respects but not the only science by any means. Its acronym is Mechanicity which unpacks as Morphology, Energy & Climate cHANge In the CITY. We have done a lot on urban morphology and somethings on energy as flows in the city. Climate change of course is the backcloth to everything that is happening in cities as we try to move to a more sustainable future but the core of our work has really been on city size and structure, working with new notions about scaling and diffusion, ways ot thinking of the properties of cities as they scale in terms of networks and transportation systems, and at the same time, building operational models of such systems: good old fashioned transportation models that are consistent with form and function and dynamics to some extent but mainly statics. To pull our work together, we are developing a new web site from our old one and in a few months it will be online and as one stop shop for getting access to our material. Elsa Arcaute and myself are pulling these ideas together and we are also extending them into a project on the distribution and performance of cities of different sizes in Britain and elsewhere. Watch this space. The podcast and the ERC publicity that you can get from the web page if you click on the image above gives you some sense of this project.