The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Giving a paper on Thursday 2nd June in London at Modelling World. Talking about Complexity in Land Use Transport Interaction (LUTI) Modelling, outlining very briefly our QUANT model for the Future Cities Catapult. This model is designed to simulate employment … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Podcast: Cities as flows in a circular economy Wrote a chapter in the new book from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation which I blogged about earlier – click here for details. But each of the chapters is accompanied by a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A couple of months ago I attended a meeting at Wilton Park in Sussex organised by the Uk Government’s Tech City Hub (http://www.techcityuk.com/) and a cloud computing company called Improbable (http://improbable.io/) specialising in massively parallel agent based modelling (for cities, transport, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Yesterday I gave a talk on driven models to the Hong Kong Poly U Department of Land Surveying and Geomatics, and today at at 2-30pm in Geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. When I got to the Poly U yesterday – and I … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Hegel once said that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ and in our world of cities, this seems ever resonant with the problems that we face. Danny Hillis and Neri Oxman have called this the Age of Entanglement and in this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Our paper in Royal Society Open Science is published this week (April 6th 2016). This is one of the major themes in our ERC Project Mechanicity which has sought to explore how we can define and classify cities according to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A really nice idea. Michael Mehaffy has put together a superb collection of comments on Chris Alexander’s famous 1965 paper “A City is Not a Tree”. The comments which are presented in slightly longer papers and shorter contributions are from those … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A really nice article from Clementine Cottineau, one of our researchers, on how Russia is shrinking (Read in English or French, from Espace Populations Sociétés. Techniques that we may be able to apply in our new Digital Economies research project to shrinking Britain, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The new book from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation contains a series of articles on cities and the built environment that relates to renewability and regeneration in terms of energy, information and new ways of conserving both physical and human resources. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You may think that this blog has enough on ‘models’ to sink a ship and I have a new editorial on this in EPB. But there is a wonderful article by Paul Krugman on models which I have just come across although written two decades or so ago. Krugman … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Chen Zhong is leading CASA’s work in measuring variability and regularity in big data from automated capture of travel demand on subway systems in three world cities. This paper in PLOS One is our first on a comparison of tap … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Vonu Thakuriah, Nebiyou Tilahun and Moira Zellner organized a very successful conference in August 2014 in Chicago. CASA had two papers at the meeting and you can drill down and find them in the Proceedings which you get access to here. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In CASA, in a project lead by Clementine Cottineau, we are working how economic and social attributes of cities scale with size. This is one of our longstanding foci in our ERC Mechanicity Work and it will also be central … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My current editorial in Environment and Planning B tracks the massive investments in infrastructure in China which have taken place since the Great Recession of 2007-2008. One of the key features of contemporary economic systems is their volatility with respect … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Our paper on London’s street network has been picked up by various blogs and tweeted as well by Steve Strogatz. The paper “Multifractal to monofractal evolution of the London street network” by Roberto Murcio, Paolo Masucci, Elsa Arcaute, and myself (Michael Batty) … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Robin Edwards and myself have improved our visualisation of city size and rank over time and this is now published as a featured graphic in Environment and Planning A in their forthcoming material. It is quite hard to represent three variables in a two-dimensional … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The notion that cities produce ideas goes back to the time when cities first emerged from our nomadic existence. Indeed it appears that human ‘progress’ through development is centred around the production of new ideas or at least the evolution of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A picture of the second CBD in Sao Paulo rapidly developing as a major financial-retailing centre in Itaim Bibi some 10 kms south west of the established centre at Paulista. Our ESRC project with the University of Sao Paulo and INPE … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Neat, crisp informative book by Antoine Picon in the AD Primer Series. Gives myself, James Cheshire and Joan Serras a mention too on transit in London and the science of cities but the book is valuable as a quick but meaty … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Giving two lectures by video at the E-Life Congress in Athens on November 6th and at the ITF-OECD Roundtable on 21st Century Public Interest Data Sharing on November 9 in Paris. The lectures are more or less the same and mirror that … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Chen Zhong (CASA) and her colleagues from ETH and MIT continue to produce interesting analyses from work with the EZ-Link data in Singapore. She introduces some interesting entropy measures along with other indices in revealing centrality in activity patterns. Her paper can … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The last two lectures of this course (lectures 9 and 10 which are 1 and 2 in session 5) are online, accessible by clicking here. For those on CASA’s MSc in Smart Cities course, these are background material and without my ‘voice over’ or ‘presence’, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Paolo Masucci led this study based on defining city boundaries – one of the key research issues in CASA on our Mechanicity project – introducing a really simple idea that cities grow to a condensation threshold after which the city is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The next two lectures of this course (lectures 7 and 8 which are 1 and 2 in session 4) are online accessible by clicking here. For those on CASA’s MSc in Smart Cities course, these are background material and without my ‘voice over’ or … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The first four lectures of this course are online accessible by clicking here. For those on CASA’s MSc in Smart Cities course, these are background material and without my ‘voice over’ or ‘presence’, you may find them a little unstructured. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In digging up material for my smart cities lectures, I have always given a short history of computer graphics by way of background to visualization of cities. In fact the first computer graphic appears to be Jay Forrester’s demonstration of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Five lecture sessions starting tonight at 6-00pm at Arizona State University to a graduate class of geographers and planners on Smart Cities. Monday, Wednesday and Friday this week and Wednesday and Friday the following week. Two lectures per session for … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Krugman is very, very insightful when it comes to social physics. His NY Times blog on ‘Gravity’ relates to an article by Adam Davidson on how a gravity model is able to simulate trade between a place called Kanesh in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A diverse selection of talks on the Science of Cities at the 2015 Conference on Complex Systems, starting this afternoon in the Sheraton Airport Hotel in Tempe AZ Canyon Room. My own talk is about our Future Cities Catapult Land … Continue reading →
Continue reading »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 … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Programmable City Project is holding a meeting on Data and the City in Maynooth from August 31- September 1st. You can get Rob Kitchin’s and Mike Batty’s papers from this blog but the programme is diverse and the Project … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Ideal Cities, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Tower The Illinois (pictured here), and Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow have fallen out of fashion in recent years. But the rise of the smart city and the notion of the instrumented … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Clementine Cottineau initiated our work on paradoxical interpretations of urban scaling laws using the example of the French city system. The paper is now on the arXiv and you get it by clicking here or going direct to the arXiv. Scaling laws for … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Urban CA models use sets of rules that are applied to each cell in the geographical array to change the state of the cell usually according to attributes that exist in the neighbourhood of the cell in question. As there … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Roberto Murcio led our work on applying ideas of information theory across scales so that mutual information can be transmitted one way, rather than symmetrically. The paper has just appeared in PLOS One. And you can Download the PDF from … Continue reading →
Continue reading »An interesting report by Anthony Townsend of Smart Cities fame about the rapid emergence of urban science and the flurry of centres that have grown up in the wake of these new ideas as well as the development of smart … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Papers on the notion that physics can help us articulate our understanding of cities are not new but there are several recent commentaries worth looking at. There is a short sharp one pager that articulates the new science of cities as being … Continue reading →
Continue reading »What we can learn here from New York: an interesting report from Eddie Copeland at the Policy Exchange. Fascinating reading from the place where open data was invented, and where Urban Mechanics was begun. I quote from the blurb: Today marks the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Nikolai Kondratieff, a Soviet-era economist in the 1920s, developed a theory of the economy where technological innovations drove the business cycle. This looked a little too like the way the capitalist world explained itself and for these sins, Stalin sent … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In human systems, defining any of the objects or attributes we work with is plagued with ambiguity. Defining cities is one of the classic problems and here we use percolation theory to ultimately define cities as connected clusters at a … Continue reading →
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