The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
The first paper published on our Simulacra model from the Tyndall Cities project, modified to deal with energy change through transport costs in Greater London. Click here to access the paper in the current issue of Environment and Planning A … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Great article from the New York Times cataloguing the many unusual ways in which Mayor Bloomberg’s group of tech savvy professionals are piecing together data from diverse sources to attack some of the cities biggest and most persistent problems. Many … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Social physics, scaling, urban informatics, energy in cities are all elements of a science of cities. The recent article by Solecki, Seto, and Marcotullio ‘It’s Time for an Urbanization Science’ in the magazine Environment develops yet another notion of what … Continue reading →
Continue reading »There is a lot of effort in the current developments involving computers and physics to think about cities as prompting a new kind of science of cities. Luis Bettencourt and Geoff West have argued this in a recent commentary in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Cities are the hot topic of the early 21st century. Read our/my agenda for what we might do. Many groups are now fashioning such an agenda for future cities dealing with every thing from smart cities, big data and simulation to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »For the online course TechniCity, I have made a little video of Big Data and our Oyster Card project using data from the subway system courtesy of Transport for London, and courtesy of our researcher Dr. Jon Reades. The video … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Returned from my travels only to be confronted with yet another lecture course which you can get from this blog, but the innovation is that I am backing up the course with the wonderful Santa Fe lectures on complexity led … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In 1999, Jeff Kenworthy & colleagues (Laube & Zeibots) published a paper entitled “Towards a Science of Cities“. Jeff recently drew my attention to this and I post it here as it is key to many indicators of city structure … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Today/this date I give/gave the Dangermond Lecture at University of California Santa Barbara on Explaining the Dynamics of City Size. Here is the PDF and there is a post on the CASA web site with more links to related work, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Presenting this morning at ESRI Geodesign Summit with the title Simulating Geodesign: Agents as Designers, Agents as Buildings. Click on the pdf to get a sense of what this is about. Most geodesign is the application of spatial analytics and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »It is a bit of a gamble to tell those who watch our CASA site that I have just started a new lecture course on Smart Cities that I am offering to graduates at ASU. A gamble because Smart Cities … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Here is a short one page missive from me printed in this month’s (January 2013) issue of Geographical (magazine) which argues the case for getting involved in these questions. Can’t find the online content (and we don’t seem to have … Continue reading →
Continue reading »40 years ago, Horst Rittel and Mel Webber published their seminal article entitled Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. In it, they argued that many, if not most, problems in cities that planners were engaged in ‘solving’, tended to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argues that we are coming to the end of more than 200 years of rapid growth in GDP. The third industrial revolution after steam which was the first, and electricity and chemistry, the second, and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Dave Banister’s group at Oxford have just started a seminar series on new approaches to transport and mobility modelling called “Modelling on the Move” and two of us from UCL, myself and Peter Jones from the Centre for Transport Studies talked … Continue reading →
Continue reading »How is that a niche research area such as the shape and form of cities using various mathematical and formal principles in geometry, allometry, scaling and social physics can have several distinct approaches that never refer to one another? Fractals … Continue reading →
Continue reading »“In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together….. “. This comment from Harvard’s Cherry Murray, Dean of Engineering … Continue reading →
Continue reading »We will all be living in cities by the end of this century (see EPA, 2011) and for the most part, cities will constitute a complex web of local-global relationships that defies our present understanding. On this way to the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Marc Barthelemy from the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IPhT) of the CEA-Saclay (France) presented a very interesting talk on the evolution of spatial networks in cities at CASA last night (November 29). Arguing that spatial networks are often richer and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Spatial interaction lies at the basis of much of our science but it has been hard, if not impossible to develop an equivalent theory of social interactions. Social interactions are hard to pin down, hard to observe and explain but … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Check out Luc D’Acci’s Blog. He has some very interesting projects on mega cities and the internal structure of cities which blends lots of ideas from economics and complexity theory with spatial structures and patterns. Some papers are downloadable
Continue reading »One last lecture before I seek landfall back In Blighty after a long trip. Today at Portugal’s oldest University Coimbra (founded 1290). Click to see pdf. This is a reworking of our lecture on real time data analysis of London’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading »12 years ago we held a meeting in CASA on Cellular Automata Models. David O’Sullivan and Paul Torrens, both PhD students at the time – in fact David had finished and it was just before he went to Penn State … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Check out our paper in Scientific Reports published on the 6th November. Click to Open Access, so no fear of breaking copyright by reading it ! What a surprise. We or rather a grant paid for it. What we argue … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This interesting meeting is being held in Oporto, Portugal and involves a reassessment of progress and problems in this field of simulation. I am giving the keynote at 2-30pm November 8th -19th and the pdf of my power point can … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Jon Reades and myself gave a talk at ECCS on how we are using our Oyster Card data to simulate disruptions to the London tube system. Added Richard Milton’s real time tube and bus data and presented our ideas at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »… chop the thesis up, scan it, and put it online for all those who should have been reading it this past three decades but couldn’t, wouldn’t, never knew it existed and so on. Or have never read a thesis … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Amin Tayyebi, a Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, asked me to make a short (<5 minute) movie about Cellular Automata Modelling so that he could put it into a series about … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Gave a talk today to the Market Research Society’s meeting on “Generating Value from the 2011 Census: How business can benefit from the new free Census data”. The talk was a compilation of ideas developed by Ollie O’Brien, Steven Gray, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Lots of CASA people speaking at the European Conference of Complex Systems at the Free University in Brussels this week. Elsa Arcaute and the Mechanicity team are talking on Scaling Laws in Cities: Is there Universality? Today (Tuesday 4th) at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Jason Dykes showed this at the GeoVisualisation Meeting in Oxford on August 30th: A map of road crashes in Great Britain (not the UK) from 1999 to 2010. It mirrors of course the road network and the density of population but it is a remarkable graphic. It was made by the BBC and first published […]
Continue reading »Phil Ball’s little book is one of the best summaries I have come across on complexity theory and its applications. This little triumph of clarity argues that society’s problems are those of highly connected systems. The book has been written … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Robert Kosara has produced some really neat maps of connected places on his blog ‘eager eyes’ where he connects “all the ZIP or postal codes in a country in ascending order”. The UK is rather integrated it seems compared to other countries. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Someone from ETH Zurich Future Cities Lab showed me a fascinating book by Serge Salat called Cities and Forms (Hermann Editions, Paris, 2011). Haven’t managed to get it (ugh! French Publishers!) but downloaded his paper “Systemic Resilience of Complex Urban Systems: … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In 1977, we made a movie about how you build retail spatial interaction models which compute the impacts of new shopping centres on their surroundings. It was made for an Open University Course called Modelling by Mathematics (TM281). It was … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CASA has a new EU (FP7: Future and Emerging Technologies) project called EUNOIA which is about Evolutive User-centric Networks fOr Intraurban Accessibility. The project will run from October 1st 2012 and is worth 268K Euros. It is part of a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Geodesign is the term coined by Carl Steinitz for the way in which “maps and geography are merging with mathematics and computing” as Jack Dangermond, President of ERSI, says in the Preface to Carl’s new book A Framework for Geodesign: … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Much of this site is about the morphology of cities using fractal geometry as one of the key unifying themes. But it is in architecture that the real modularity of fractals has become a central feature in design. Harris’s exposition … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Mathematical Puzzle That Is the Complexity of the City: An interesting article in the Atlantic Cities pages by Samuel Arbesman on how we are developing this science of cities – a prelude the workshop at Santa Fe this week … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Check out the Future Cities Lab established by ETH Zurich in Singapore. Many projects dealing with every aspects of the city-state but relevant to our own work on land use transport and mobility is their MATSims model which is now running … Continue reading →
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