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The CASA Blog Network

The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).

    The CASA Blog Network

    Author: Max Nathan

    Podcast: how creative industries drive urban economies

    Posted on Tuesday 25 October 2022 by Max Nathan

    I have a new City Talks podcast with Eliza Easton (Deputy Director of the Creative PEC) and Centre for Cities CEO Andrew Carter. We talk about creative clusters, whether creative industries drive city growth, and what policymakers can do to help.The po…

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    Cities, creativity, economic-development, public-policy, urban planning

    Come and work with me

    Posted on Thursday 6 October 2022 by Max Nathan

    Job alert! I am recruiting an economist and a data scientist to join my new UKRI-funded project. We’re looking at the effects of diversities on productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship in UK firms and cities.The project is based at UCL, and is joi…

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    Uncategorized

    Creative clusters and creative multipliers

    Posted on Wednesday 17 August 2022 by Max Nathan

    Change in creative vs. non-tradable jobs, UK urban travel to work areas, 1998–2018Creative and cultural industries are very urbanised. What are the impacts of these creative clusters on their surrounding cities?In a new open access paper with Diana, Ta…

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    Clustering, creativity, economic-development, public-policy, urban planning

    New paper: Modelling clusters from the ground up

    Posted on Thursday 14 July 2022 by Max Nathan

    Heads up — I have a new clusters paper out, open access, written with Emmanouil Tranos and Christoph Stich.It’s largely technical — we develop a new set of tools for tracking cluster evolution using geolocated business website text and metadata, then t…

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    entrepreneurship, innovation, Machine Learning, Tech City, urbanism

    A big new ESRC grant

    Posted on Friday 25 March 2022 by Max Nathan

    Some self-promotion — a team I’m leading has won one of seven new big ESRC grants for productivity research.Our new project will explore the economic effects of diverse teams and workplaces — and the wider role of urban diversity — on entrepreneurship,…

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    Cities, diversity, entrepreneneurship, innovation, productivity

    A big new ESRC grant

    Posted on Friday 25 March 2022 by Max Nathan

    Some self-promotion — a team I’m leading has won one of seven new big ESRC grants for productivity research.Our new project will explore the economic effects of diverse teams and workplaces — and the wider role of urban diversity — on entrepreneurship,…

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    Cities, diversity, entrepreneneurship, innovation, productivity

    The Long And Winding Road**

    Posted on Wednesday 16 February 2022 by Max Nathan

    I haven’t read the Levelling Up White Paper yet but I’m going to talk about it anyway.I haven’t read it yet because it’s very long, I’m quite busy with other things right now — it’s a busy teaching term — and because many smart people have read and sum…

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    Cities, economic-development, local-government, urban planning

    My Struggle

    Posted on Thursday 10 February 2022 by Max Nathan

    I haven’t read the Levelling Up White Paper but I’m going to talk about it anyway.I haven’t read it because it’s very long, like many of you I’m quite busy with other things right now, and because many smart people have read and summarised it already.B…

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    Cities, economics, Government, urban planning

    The City and the Virus, redux

    Posted on Tuesday 4 January 2022 by Max Nathan

    The City and the Virus, reduxI’ve got a new paper on COVID-19 and cities published in Urban Studies. You can read the whole thing here: it’s open access.I say new — it’s actually an extensive update and rebuild of this long blogpost I did in 2020. Not …

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    Cities, covid19, Pandemic, urban planning, urbanism

    New paper: Innovative Events

    Posted on Thursday 21 October 2021 by Max Nathan

    Anna and I have a new paper out in Research Policy. Publishing this has been an epic experience: six years in the making.The TLDR; we introduce a brand-new measure of innovative activity — media-reported product and service launches — and run it throug…

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    Data Science, entrepreneurship, innovation, productivity

    The deactivated city?

    Posted on Monday 14 June 2021 by Max Nathan

    The lovely people at the KooZA/rch platform have published an interview with me, on the theme of the ‘deactivated city’: how COVID-19 has altered urban form and processes, and how far these changes might stick around.They’ve also added some superb phot…

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    Cities, covid19, economics, urban planning, urbanism

    Incubators, accelerators and cities

    Posted on Thursday 10 June 2021 by Max Nathan

    Incubators, accelerators and urban economic developmentI’ve got a new paper on incubators, accelerators and cities out in Urban Studies. It’s written with Margarida Madaleno, Henry Overman and Sevrin Waights.Why should you read it? I think there’s four…

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    Cities, entrepreneurship, innovation, startup-accelerators, urbanism

    COVID-19 and the future of big cities

    Posted on Wednesday 23 September 2020 by Max Nathan

    Will coronavirus cause a big city exodus? A long read.Continue reading on Medium »

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    Cities, coronavirus, economics, urbanism, working-from-home

    The city and the virus

    Posted on Thursday 14 May 2020 by Max Nathan

    Cities are the epicentres of the coronavirus pandemic. Why?Continue reading on Medium »

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    Cities, coronavirus, covid19, economics, urban planning

    Podcast: does cluster policy work?

    Posted on Tuesday 18 February 2020 by Max Nathan

    City in the Air, Arata IsozakiCentre for Cities have put up a new City Talks podcast I did with CEO Andrew Carter, talking about cities, clusters, cluster policy tools and the Tech City programme. Later on we also go into some more nerdy stuff about po…

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    Cities, economics, public-policy, urban planning, urbanism

    Swings and Silicon Roundabouts

    Posted on Thursday 14 November 2019 by Max Nathan

    Did the Tech City cluster programme actually help East London tech firms? Let’s find out.Continue reading on The Startup »

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    Clustering, economic-development, entrepeneurship, innovation, startup

    Innovative Events

    Posted on Friday 4 October 2019 by Max Nathan

    Anna and I have a new CEP Discussion Paper out looking at innovation and productivity in UK firms. Read it here.It’s quite technical. Working with the data science firm Growth Intelligence, we combine rich administrative info with media text and machin…

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    Data Science, economics, innovation, Machine Learning, productivity

    I’m moving to UCL

    Posted on Monday 5 August 2019 by Max Nathan

    Some job news: I’m excited to say that I’m taking up a new role at UCL in September. I’ll be a new Associate Professor in Applied Urban Sciences at the Centre for Applied Spatial Analysis (CASA), part of the Bartlett faculty of the built environment.Th…

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    economics, innovation, public-policy, urban planning, urbanism

    Working hard, but what for?

    Posted on Friday 10 May 2019 by Max Nathan

    © Tim Mazzarol 2014Back from Glasgow, where I’ve been at the University talking about entrepreneurial ecosystems. Many thanks to Ben Spigel and Fumi Kitagawa for inviting me, and for organising such a nice group of people.It was a pretty striking event…

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    Cities, economic-development, entrepreneurship, innovation, startup

    Spatial Imaginaries and Tech Cities

    Posted on Monday 29 April 2019 by Max Nathan

    The original Silicon Roundabout. © Matt BiddulphI have a new paper out in the Journal of Economic Geography, written with Emma Vandore and Georgina Voss.It draws on 10 years of fieldwork by the three of us, and looks at tech clusters, specifically how …

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    economic-development, entrepreneurship, startup, Tech City, urban planning

    Industrial strategy: four rationales

    Posted on Thursday 14 March 2019 by Max Nathan

    © Andy GilmoreA What Works Centre piece, part of our industrial strategy design guide.It features in our 10 Principles report, which forms the centrepiece of a major programme of work with central and local decisionmakers in 2018 and 2019.As a fast rev…

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    economic-development, economics, entrepreneurship, innovation

    Design principles for local industrial strategy

    Posted on Thursday 14 March 2019 by Max Nathan

    Design principles for a West Midlands local industrial strategyHere’s something I wrote for the 2018 Birmingham Economic Review, produced by my colleagues at City-REDI.In the UK, like many other countries, industrial strategy has been back on the polic…

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    economic-development, industrial-strategy, innovation, local-government, what-works

    Thank you! Appreciated.

    Posted on Saturday 6 October 2018 by Max Nathan

    Thank you! Appreciated.

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    Uncategorized

    The economics of incubators and accelerators

    Posted on Monday 1 October 2018 by Max Nathan

    WeWork.I’ve written a new CEP Discussion Paper on co-working, incubators, accelerators and what they mean for local economic development policy (co-authored with Margarida Madaleno, Henry Overman and Sevrin Waights). It builds on two toolkits for the W…

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    accelerator, coworking, economics, incubator, urban planning

    Channel 4’s HQ2: where and why?

    Posted on Thursday 31 May 2018 by Max Nathan

    TL,DR; the economics says Manchester.Channel 4 is moving 300 staff out of London, with most going to a major British city.* The HQ2 shortlist has just been announced, and seven city-regions are on it: Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Greate…

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    Cities, economic-development, economics, media, urban planning

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    • @emergentcity The personal blog-space of Gareth Simons -> architect | urbanist interested in performative simulation at the urban scale; space and flows as computational processes; information entropy & irreversibility; and the ‘edge of chaos’. Views are my own.
    • A Science of Cities complexcity
    • Adam Dennett
    • Alex Singleton
    • BDTK Blog Just another WordPress site
    • blog – ENFOLDing Global Dynamics and Complex Systems
    • CEDE Creating and Exploring Digital Empathy
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    • Crowd Simulation
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    • DataShine Blog DataShine is an output of the ESRC BODMAS project which ran from 2013-2015 at UCL. To cite the project or websites, please use: Oliver O’Brien & James Cheshire (2016) Interactive mapping for large, open demographic data sets using familiar geographical fe
    • Digital Urban Data, Cities, IoT and Making Things
    • en-topia Urban Planning and the future of the city
    • GENeSIS Digital Social Research
    • George MacKerron: code blog GIS, software development, and other snippets
    • GIS + AR (Augmented Reality)
    • GIS and Agent-Based Modeling This is a research site focused around my interests in Geographical Information Science (GIS) and Agent-Based Modeling (ABM).
    • heartcode Coding “hard”, with the heart… :-)
    • James Cheshire Geography & Cartography
    • jpg4.us – little caprice dp' Search ,Fujian Shipbuilding Trading Co. Ltd. Shipbuilding in China
    • Mapping London Highlighting the best London maps
    • mechanicity.info An ERC Advanced Grant
    • O.O'Brien Thoughts on urban mobility services, digital cartography and data visualisation.
    • Output Area Classification User Group – OAC Open and Free Geodemographics
    • Pablo Mateos Associate Professor
    • Paul Longley Professor of Geographic Information Science, University College London
    • Placetique People, Data, Place
    • Po Ve Sham – Muki Haklay's personal blog GIScience, Citizen Science & Environmental Information
    • Population Geography promoting population geography, supporting population geographers
    • Python – Hannah Fry Dr. of fluid dynamics, researcher of complexity theory and all round bad-ass.
    • Quaestio research: questioning, inquiring, seeking, searching and scrutinising
    • QuanTile Quantitative Teaching, Research and Outreach in Geography
    • Quantitative Methods Research Group (QMRG) – Royal Geographical Society with IBG
    • Simone Caschili UCL QASER Lab & CASA Research Associate, University College London
    • Simulacra Showcasing land use transport modelling, urban complexity and sustainability research from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London
    • Smart Cities Mainly Based on my Lectures on Models, Complexity, and Smart Cities at ASU, CUHK, CUSP at NYU, Ritsumeikan, SUFE-Shanghai, Tel Aviv, and UCL, with blogging odds and ends thrown in for good measure
    • Snakes on a brain Attempting scientific and mathematical programming in Python.
    • Sociable Physics Because “social physicist” is not an oxymoron.
    • Spatial Analysis | Scoop.it All the new curated posts for the topic: Spatial Analysis
    • Steven Gray
    • Stories by Max Nathan on Medium Stories by Max Nathan on Medium
    • Talisman Geospatial Data Analysis and Simulation
    • topometries Land-use dynamics, pedestrian behaviour and transport simulation, multi-agent systems and spatial morphology
    • Urbagram An Instiki wiki
    • UrbanMovements Flows, Behaviour and Networks in the City
    • UrbanTick
    • Volunteered Geographic Information A Geography/GIS blog by Daniel J Lewis
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