Author: Quaestio

Research has to be ‘written up’. To some, writing comes easily – though I suspect this is on the basis of learning through experience. To many, especially research students at the time of thesis writing, it seems like a mountain … Continue reading →

Journals and conferences are certainly proliferating. I receive e-mails weekly inviting me to submit papers to new journals and daily inviting me to sign up for conferences. These are virtually all related to commercial profit-making enterprises rather than from, say, … Continue reading →

The idea of ‘DNA’ has become a commonplace metaphor. The real DNA is the genetic code that underpins the development of organisms. I find the idea useful in thinking about the development of – the evolution of – cities. This … Continue reading →

(From the Urban transformations website) We know a lot about cities, but there is much more that we need to know to meet future challenges effectively. My aim here is to sketch some research priorities from the perspective of the … Continue reading →

This is the twentieth blog in this weekly series and after this there will be a summer break – a restart in October all being well! Trams have a long history in British cities and are now being re-invented for … Continue reading →

Territories are defined by boundaries at scales ranging from countries and indeed alliances of countries) to neighbourhoods via regions and cities. These may be government or administrative boundaries, some formal, some less so; or they may be socially defined as … Continue reading →

I was at school in the 1950s – Queen Elizabeth Grammar School Darlington – with Ian Hamilton. He went on to Oxford and became a significant and distinguished poet, critic, writer and editor – notable, perhaps, for shunning academia and … Continue reading →

The most famous equations with names – in one case by universal association – seem to come from physics: Newton’s Law of Gravity – the gravitational force between two objects is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the … Continue reading →

In the modern era, mathematical and computer models of cities have been in development for around sixty years – not surprisingly, mirroring the growth of computing power. Much has been achieved. We are pretty good at modelling the flows of … Continue reading →

Urban and regional science – a discipline or a subdiscipline, or is it still called interdisciplinary? – has been good at welcoming people from other disciplines, notably in recent times, physicists. Can we venture outside our box? It would be … Continue reading →

I was recruited to a post that was the start of my urban modelling career in the Autumn of 1964 by Christopher Foster (now Sir Christopher) to work on the cost-benefit analysis of major transport projects. My job was to … Continue reading →

Let us begin by asserting that any piece of research is concerned with a ‘system of interest’ – henceforth ‘the system’ (cf. Systems thinking). We can then make a distinction between the ‘science of the system’ and the ‘applied science … Continue reading →

I was Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for 6 years up to December 2013. Like the other research councils, and like most universities, we always said that we funded research that is ‘excellent’ and ‘world class’. However, … Continue reading →

One route into urban research is to reflect on the well known and very real challenges that cities face. The most obvious ones can be classified as ‘wicked problems’ in that they have been known for a long time, usually … Continue reading →

An appropriate ambition of the model-building component of urban science is the construction of the best possible comprehensive model which represents the interdependencies that make cities complex (and interesting) systems. To articulate this is to spell out a kind of … Continue reading →

Brian Arthur introduced a new and important idea in his book The nature of technology: that of ‘combinatorial evolution’. The argument, put perhaps overly briefly, is essentially this: a ‘technology’, an aeroplane say, can be thought of as a system, … Continue reading →

Systems thinking (see earlier entry) drives us to interdisciplinarity: we need to know everything about a system of interest and that means anything and everything that any relevant discipline can contribute. For almost any social science system of interest, there … Continue reading →

Much research follows the current fashion. This leads me to develop an argument around two questions. How does ‘fashion’ come about? How should we respond to it? I begin by reflecting on my personal experience. My research career began in … Continue reading →

There are starting points that we can take from ‘systems thinking’  and theory development (‘evolvere theoria et intellectum’). Add ‘methods’ (including data – ‘Nullius in verba’) to this and this becomes the STM first step. S: define the system of … Continue reading →

We need data; but we need to encapsulate our understanding of cities in theories; and then we need to represent these theories in models. From ‘Nullius in verba’ to ‘Evolvere theoria et intellectum’ as a subsidiary motto: develop theory and … Continue reading →