The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
A special issue of the new journal Dialogues in Human Geography has just come out devoted to Geography and Big Data. There are several commentaries on the position paper by Mark Graham and Taylor Shelton entitled ‘Geography and the future … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A Review of Smart Cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia by Anthony M. Townsend and my own book The New Science of Cities by Michael Batty, by Tim Smedley in New Scientist Magazine issue … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Friday December 6th I presented a TEDxLondon talk in the City 2.0 series. I must admit then when they invited me to present something on cities, I thought they had mistaken me for …. well, it was a surprise, anyway, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »We have a new EU FP7 project titled INSIGHT (Innovative Policy Modelling and Governance Tools for Sustainable Post-Crisis Urban Development). This is a research project funded under the ICT Theme of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. INSIGHT aims to investigate … Continue reading →
Continue reading »We have a chapter in this new book on London 2062 which is a brief summary of our transport work using big data. The chapter is called Smart London but the book covers a wide array of topics. It is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »There are just some photographs that speak for themselves. Admittedly this van is positioned to watch over 1 World Trade Center but it is quite a surprise if you think it is just another police van when its camera suddenly ascends … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass where gentrification combines with public art just north of Brooklyn Heights, I discovered one of the secrets of America in the new world of smart cities, ICT, and citizen science: data streaming. Half a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CUSP – New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress – in launching their Masters program in Applied Urban Science and Informatics, have put together a fascinating course called Foundations of Urban Science which is being taught this fall by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This is the first book on ‘smart cities’. It is a deep and thoughtful critique, as well as an absorbing and personal account. Anthony Townsend tells us how computers and their software and services are being embedded into cities, how we … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros have written a nice paper on networks which is the online journal Biourbanism. They quote from E. Forster who made much in stories of the fact that we need to ‘connect’. His novella The Machine … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Read our editorial in the current issue of Transactions in GIS about “Applied Urban Modeling: New Types of Spatial Data Provide a Catalyst for New Models”. The issues contains four papers on recent developments in urban modelling originally presented at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My current editorial in Environment and Planning B deals with the impact that the technologies we invent have on the very object that we are studying with the same technologies: using computers to study cities that are now composed of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Mike Batty, Bill Hillier and Stephen Marshall are all presenting at the 2nd Delft Complexity meeting which runs for the next three days at TUDelft. Juval Portugali is the spirit behind these meetings and the edited book from the first … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I give my Prix Vautrin-Lud Lecture today at 2pm in Saint Die des Vosges where Vautrin Lud organised the production of the first map of America in 1507. This was named after Amerigo Vespucci, an early traveller to America who … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Andre Svetsuk and the City Form Lab have just announced the Urban Networks Analysis Toolbox v1.01 for ArcGIS. This can be downloaded free. The following text is from their web site. As the first of its kind, this ArcGIS toolbox can be … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A new book by David O’Sullivan and George Perry called Spatial Simulation: Exploring Pattern and Process (Wiley, 2013) is an important landmark text for all those involved in CA and ABM. I quote from the back cover: “O’Sullivan and Perry … Continue reading →
Continue reading »At ECCS ’13 this morning, Elsa Arcaute, Lecturer in Urban Modelling in CASA, is talking about our work on city size using percolation theory which has analogies to Hernan Makse’s work on percolation and the brain. Click here for the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Several of us from the Mechanicity and Eunoia Projects are embarked on an expedition to the European Conference on Complex Systems held this year in Barcelona. Tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday, we present in various satellite sessions devoted to Complexity-Net, our … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Urban Systems Collaborative (USC) Annual Meeting Is being held at Imperial College in London today and tomorrow (10-11 September). The meeting is essentially about smart cities but in particular how smart cities affect the quality of life in cities, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CASA members presented at this meeting which is being held at Dourdan near Paris September 6-9. Melanie Bosredon and Robin Morphet presented papers on their various models of land use systems and Mike Batty joined Wolfgang Weidlich and Peter Allen … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Riccardo Maria Pulselli from the Ecodynamics Group at the University of Siena has put his fascinating book on urban kinetics online. Click here to view. In it he demonstrates that cities are never in equilibrium, they are always changing, and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I am updating the site – and have added new editorials and articles. Some of these files are big but I will reduce their size in due course. The site will also be extended to complement my new book The … Continue reading →
Continue reading »For many years, almost from the time when Newton first presented his laws of gravitation, speculations and applications of the gravity model to human interactions have been made. In the 19th century, Carey and Ravenstein led the way with Reilly, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »If you click here you can see out paper on the analysis of London’s street network from the 18th century to the modern day. It was published this past week (12th August) in PLoS One and is open access, the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The third annual meeting of the USC will be held at Imperial College on 11th and 12th September. The USC is the web forum set up by interested people in the smart cities movement in the US and maintains an … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Amin Tayyebi from the Energy Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has organized a collection of videos about land use change using Cellular Automata and related cell-space models and methods. He commissioned these individually and if you click on the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »AESOP-ACSP is the joint European and American Associations of Planning Schools conference held this year in Dublin at UCD. The theme is resilience in cities and how planning might best respond to it. This is a popular term and is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Rob Kitchin’s paper on smart cities focuses on “… how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A variety of interesting papers in Utrecht for the 13th Meeting of Computers in Urban Modelling and Urban Management (July 3-5, 2013). Harry Timmermans gave an interesting keynote “What-ifs, if-whats and maybes : sketch of ubiquitous collaborative decision support technology” which is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Luis Bettencourt’s paper in Science on The Origins of Scaling in Cities and my commentary on it called a Theory of City Size are summarised in a rather nice piece from Rachel Ehernberg in this week’s Science News where she … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Today Flora Roumpani presents her work on urban modelling using City Engine. Anders Johansson, Kiril Stanilov and Pete Ferguson all present today and tomorrow Vassilis Zachariasis presents. Big CASA presence at this meeting.This is the third meeting in this series … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CSIRO are running a workshop in their Science Frontier Symposium in central Melbourne from today 12th to friday 14th June. I am talking about a Science of Cities this afternoon at 3-30 in Melbourne Town Hall with Peter Newman and Bob … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This is more or less a repeat of my course at ASU earlier this year and although I peppered this with a lot more comment and discussion in terms of the actual presentations to graduates at Tel-Aviv University (TAU), most … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The biggest data of all comes from online searchers where there are over 2 billion searches a day, for example, on Google. This is what John Battelle has called the database of intentions for it contains a myriad of what we … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In the May Issue of Scientific American, Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute argues that we will get nowhere with big data if we don’t figure out the big theory that needs to go with it. Data and theory … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Short, sharp discussion of smart cities at Coventry University’s Serious Games Institute (this afternoon, May 8th starting at 1pm) with a talk by myself which mirrors my talk to the AGI a couple of months ago in Edinburgh (click here … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The folks at Redfish Group in Santa Fe, NM have launched simtable which lets users sculpt the landscape and project onto it visual media that is produced by agent-based models of how the landscape changes. Wildfire is their current simulation using … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My talk is here to download as a PDF and at some point the Santa Fe Web Site (which you can get below will have the video. I will post the video too on our CASA web site. My talk at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Suddenly the world seems to have woken up to the fact that we can treat cities as a science. More than 100 years ago, Patrick Geddes said ”Thus, in fact, appear the methods of a Science of Cities …..” in Cities in … Continue reading →
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