The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Asked by Built Environment to review this some 18 months after it was first published, the world of smart cities has moved on so fast at the level of how we use personal devices to navigate, shop, search etc. that Anthony … Continue reading →
Continue reading »By the end of this century, we will all be living in Cities but what does this really mean? I have given various talks and written various editorials on this prospect but have never really thought much about what this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Certainly one of the best books ever on transport modelling. We have been waiting for this sort of book for a long time. Anyone who wants to figure out the reasons why different kinds of transport model have been developed … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Carlos, Elsa, Duncan and myself (Mike) decided to explore next week’s British election using some of our social physics, specifically our work on uncovering urban hierarchies through percolation theory, which basically consists on looking at the connectivity of ‘representative’ areas … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Our new paper reports research on the definition of cities led by A. Paolo Masucci with Elsa Arcaute, Jiaqiu Wang, Erez Hatna, Kiril Stanilov and Michael Batty. Its in the arXiv and you can get it here from this link. Here is the abstract: Urban morphology has presented significant … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Recently I was asked to speculate on what strides had been made in urban and transport modelling during the last 20 years and what did I think models would evolve to in the next 20. The current editorial in EPB … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Once in a while along comes a wonderful piece of historical research that again illustrates that in most fields, there is little new under the sun. Andrew Odlyzko’s recent paper entitled “The forgotten discovery of gravity models and the inefficiency … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A very nicely produced review of geocomputation in this edited book by Chris Brunsdon and Alex Singleton. It covers many interesting new techniques from agent based models to new visual statistics, from crowdsourcing methods to the newer scripting languages that are … Continue reading →
Continue reading »….. is a short article by Richard Sennett in the LSE Cities’ programs current Urban Age magazine Governing Urban Futures. He makes the point that all the hype about big cities wanting their own governance is somewhat put into the shade … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My colleagues Zhao Yiting and Long Ying from the Beijing City Lab have graciously translated our paper called Smart Cities of the Future. I owe them many thanks. It is available in a special issue of the journal Urban Planning International (1673-9493, 2014, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Alluvial diagrams were first proposed to represent changes in network structure over time. Robin Edwards from CASA has implemented the tool and has several examples from social and political arrays which he shows in his blog GeoTheory. Rosvall and Bergstrom’s popularisation of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A spectre is haunting urban growth relating to how development is financed. My current editorial in Environment and Planning B (December 2014, issue 6) discusses the increasing disconnect between demand and supply of new buildings using the example of Wuhan … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Well I don’t know what it means either. But if you read Czech you should be off to a flying start, and the Czech guy who translated it assures me that all of Eastern Europe read Czech so there you … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Our work on attempting to repeat the work of the Santa Fe group who show that as cities get bigger (primarily for the USA) they get more than proportionately richer, has drawn a massive blank for the UK urban system (England … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Andy and myself have done a paper for the Autumn 2014 issue of the Urban Design Journal that explores the range of visual analytics by which we mean visualisations that have an analytical meaning – 3D, maps, graphics, flows and dashboards. You … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Found myself speaking at a massive extravaganza the 2014 Internet Festival in Pisa this coming Saturday 11th October amongst a fascinating line up. In a session with Laszlo Barabasi, Carlo Mol and Davy Jansenns, about how the physical meets the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Beijing City Lab now contains nearly 50 papers on how the technologies that form a science of cities are being applied in China. There is an interesting paper by Wang Jingyuan on smart cities that is worth looking at. It is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Matt Zook drew my attention to this paper in an article he and his colleagues recently wrote called The ‘actually existing smart city’. In it, they point to the fact that a science of cities is not new – that it … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Many will know that the world’s greatest planning academic passed away yesterday after a short illness. He was a great friend of CASA convincing me to come and run it in 1995 and doing much to establish and support what … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Absolutely the best thing to read on the corporate hype and innuendos from the big computer companies pedalling the idea of ‘the smart city’. Adam Greenfield’s new book – that you can only get on Kindle and which was my … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I first met Leo Kadanoff in Cambridge, England in the summer of 1974, I think. He would not remember me but he had been invited to give a talk on urban dynamics at the second Cambridge Land Use and Built … Continue reading →
Continue reading »40 years ago, Douglass B Lee published his notorious article “Requiem for Large Scale Models” in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners on the demise of the first generation of urban computer models in the United States. In … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In planning there are various Centenary events this year and next. This year the Bartlett School of Planning will celebrate its existence for 100 years along with the Royal Town Planning Institute, also founded 100 years ago in 1914. Next … Continue reading →
Continue reading »So said the English statistician George Box with his colleague Norman Draper in his 1987 book Empirical Model Building. I saw him espouse this idea at the Royal Statistical Society in a lecture in the 1980s and the quote is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »“The city is not only a community, it is a conflux. ….The real city, as a center of industry, is a conflux of streams of traffic; as a center of culture, it is conflux of streams of thought.” So wrote … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Subtitled “A Festschrift for Professor Peter M. Allen“ You may say ‘I don’t read Festschrifts, stuffy old things for a bygone age. Wrong ! Always wrong and you must read this one! Because here is someone who has had a massive … Continue reading →
Continue reading »An interesting new book by Shi-Kung Lai and Haoying Han which weaves together their various papers which range from strict cellular automata models of urban processes to models of organisational structures such as Cohen’s decision-making model applied to planning (The … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This is a project that I never quite imagined I would be involved with as I have always thought that I straddled the boundary and reflected the tensions of trying to seek an understanding of cities in contrast to an … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Tel Aviv is fast becoming an ever more powerful symbol of high tech. In the 1920s before the establishment of the Israeli state, it was famed for its rapid development in the Bauhaus style, and our predecessor at UCL Sir … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This past week I have been giving the Israel Pollack distinguished lecture series at Technion in Haifa, the School of Architecture and Town Planning, talking about smart cities and big data (PDF here), and rank clocks and scaling (PDF here). … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Michael Szell from the SENSEable Cities Lab at MIT has given my book a very generous review in this week’s edition of Science (28 February, Volume 343, pp. 970-971) where he suggests that my synthesis defines a way forward for … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The second version of this online course starts on 26th February. Register here. I posted a comment when the course began and that is still relevant. Click for this. There is a shortish neat manual that tells you about last … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Science and the City is an annual weekend-long hackfest, co-organized by NYU’s ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Programme, and CUSP, the Center for Urban Science and Progress. The theme is citizen science for exploring and improving our urban environment. Some of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A major problem in understanding contemporary (and future) cities is the fact that they ‘appear’ to be changing faster than we can keep up. Our theories which were culled in the last half century about how cities are spatially organised … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Amazingly as far back as January 1967, we were quite literally talking about ‘a science of cities’, using the cliche. Jennifer Light’s book From Warfare to Welfare published in 2003 recounts the optimism of the 1960s in which many believed … Continue reading →
Continue reading »UCL has many famous sons. Brian Berry graduated here in 1955 before he went Stateside and Roger Tomlinson, the ‘father of GIS’ who coined the very term in the early 1960s, did his PhD here. Carl Steinitz who is a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A fascinating virtual lab pulling together research in urban science focussed on researchers from several Chinese universities and agencies in Beijing. From their site, they say “The Beijing City Lab (BCL) is a virtual research community, dedicated to studying, but … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Big Data Future is a conference at Ohio State University 19-21 March 2014 hosted by I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society in the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. It is supported by Battelle, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In our collaboration with the Complexity Group at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), we are involved in various simulations of development in Singapore. James Decraene, Chris Monterola, Gary Lee, Terence Hung, and myself have built a simple … Continue reading →
Continue reading »From 2011 to 2021 London’s population will grow by a million – the fastest rate of acceleration ever. We are going to hit nine million before New York, and approach ten million by 2030. With these demographic projections, we will … Continue reading →
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