The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
James Canton in a prescient article in Significance argues that cities will diversify as they get larger. Like Dobbs & Remes in their McKinsey report, he argues there is effectively no limit on their growth. At least not in terms … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Nice movie of traffic moving and link volumes in Milton Keynes by Joan Serras working on our SCALE project. Notice the peak and the fact that as is quite usual for such traffic, the morning peak is more accentuated than …
Continue reading »At the Complex-City Workshop held at the Tinbergen Institute in the Free University of Amsterdam held 5-6 December 2011, CASA presented a variety of papers. Alan Wilson presented a paper […]
Continue reading »A one day EPSRC-funded workshop (at which yours truly presented) in Oxford at the Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks group (CABDyN) at the Said Business School (1st December 2011) had five interesting speakers all talking about the new social physics of …
Continue reading »Provides a complete reference guide for understanding how to apply ABM to geographical systems Presents the latest ideas and applications using ABM Addresses the issue of applying ABM in a spatial context. This unique book brings together a comprehensive set of papers on …
Continue reading »Notwithstanding Rutherford’s quote “Qualitative is nothing but poor quantitative”, my old article (1982, but rediscovered! on the web) may have contemporary resonance if not relevance. How to think about discontinuities in social systems in terms of catastrophe theory: riots and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Topical visualisations of flows: so simple, so effective. How we can visualise the flow of debt in the west between countries by the BBC and even better by the New York Times which introduces scenarios about future flows, reflecting contagion, phase … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Well I only know what it means because others translated it for me – click left image for it in Czech and here for it in English as I posted it once before as Cities, Complexity and Emergent Order. The … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Here is my lecture given at the North American Regional Science Association Annual Conference in Miami, 11th Nov 2011. It is as good a summary as I can muster of complexity theory applied to cities & regions. I focus on … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My first contribution, albeit a very minor one, to this area for a very long time; with Kai Cao and others from CUHK and elsewhere. Read our article now online at IJGIS. To an extent, this is an area not well represented here … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Martin Austwick has an interesting piece on defining complexity which is what I am trying to do in my Spatial Complexity course. If you click on the link to the left or here, there is a small comment about entropy … Continue reading →
Continue reading »BitCity tomorrow (3rd November) at Columbia (NYC). Click left for my presentation on Cities as Flow Systems. Talks about CASA’s Oyster Card, Bikes, Networks, and LUTI model projects and how they can be used to look at fractured networks. Thanks … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The last lecture! – you can download from Lecture 8 above or by clicking the icon left. This lecture does not quite do what I intended but reworks an earlier lecture of mine on land use transportation models focussing on … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Click left for the lecture or above on Lecture 7. More on entropy and information here, and I rework some of the material of Lecture 6. Note the random collisions model and run Chen’s online movie and have look at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Amazing what you discover when you search the web. Couldn’t find Ravenstein’s 1888 map that Waldo Tobler sent me as a detailed scan. Its framed in my room at UCL and somewhere on the web I know. What I did … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The icon left is rather appropriate for Arizona and the wild west, don’t you think. Entropy is increasing as we head towards the end of the course. The sixth lecture deals with our third form of scaling, scaling with space, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This entry goes to the CASA blog aggregator so those viewing it will be getting a blow by blow account of each lecture as I post it. As I don’t lecture much in CASA, at least it shows when I am … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You can now download the fourth lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 4, or click the icon to the left of this post. This lecture continues the first kind of scaling based on size distributions focussing on names, high … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You can now download the third lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 3, or click the icon to the left of this post. This lecture focuses on the first kind of scaling which pertains to city size distributions. We look at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You can now download the second lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 2, or by clicking the icon to the left of this post. More bibliography is on its way and this second lecture focuses on patterns and fractals as well … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Started my new lecture course on Spatial Complexity at Arizona State University. It’s killing me doing relatively new stuff day after day. Lectures are posted after given: Seven so far, the last on Wednesday (2/11) (at http://www.spatialcom…
Continue reading »Spatial Complexity Has Started – you can download the first lecture from the Menu Item above Lecture 1, or by clicking the icon to the left of this post. If you go to www.complexcity.info then you can retrieve the basic background … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Paul Allen & Mark Greaves argue that the singularity that Ray Kurzweil amongst others are predicting within the next 30 years where AI & biomedicine merge and our species transforms, will not come to pass. This drama will be avoided by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You go to conferences and learn about older papers that you should have known about. This short article from 1999 by Thomas Graedel poses the key issues about energy, ecosystems and cities, part of a series from the National Academy … Continue reading →
Continue reading »is a project led by ETH Zurich and UCL which deals with the simulation of highly interconnected coupled social systems characterised by extreme events and fast dynamics: i.e. things that go on in Cities. See it on Vimeo, explore the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Book Article Editorial Lecture Working Paper
Continue reading »Tweet Sometimes, we miss the best of articles … Complexity theory has found it hard to embrace policy as well as the other way round. Woodlief’s 1998 paper shows that it is not only routine development that generates path dependence … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Tweet Geosimulation is the term first used for modelling geospatial systems by Benenson and Torrens where the models in question focus on agents, objects, cells and patterns. Marceau & Benenson present a snapshot of the state of the art in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Tweet Andrew Crooks notes the work of Doyne Farmer with Rob Axtell on ABMs for housing markets which pointed to an article by Rob on Why Agents? More on these ideas in our edited book Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems published by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Tweet Murray Gell-Mann says the “accumulation of frozen accidents is what gives the world its effective complexity.” These are events that define path dependence. The idea that a city is a sequence of accidents sharpens our sense of cities as patterns of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A short paper on key ideas that explain how patterns of urban morphology conceived in terms of networks and/or cells emerge from the bottom up and how cities restructure themselves in the same way. This tells in simple terms what this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Many interesting approaches were presented at Strathclyde Complex Transport Networks meeting this week, ranging from slime mould networks to more conventional transportation geometries. Our paper using London Oyster Card data can be downloaded from presentations on this site or by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Use the Player Bar above for Audio. A Webinar to the Urban Systems Collaborative organized by the IBM Smart Cities Group in Armonk, NY focusing on CASA’s work on tracking, measuring, modeling and visualizing city systems. For a glance at the Slides, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The focus is shifting to real time analysis of city systems with many links between urban mobility, energy and ICT. Trantopoulos, Schlapfer and Helbing suggest that the nervous system of a city be explored using ‘Techno-Social Reality Mining’. References to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Simulation models test theories against data we cannot reproduce in the physical environment their theory relates to. We cannot experiment on the real thing. But how different are simulations from experiments? In Science in Age of Computer Simulation, Winsberg presents … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A complex system is often defined as ‘emergent’ when some process generates unexpected, surprising and ordered outcomes. The classic exemplar is segregation in Schelling’s model. But there is strong, weak, first order, second order emergence. Click to read Nigel Gilbert’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The TfL Oyster Card Tube and Train flow volumes over 24 hrs at 666 (don’t worry about the number) hubs reveal classic diurnal peaks but the profiles are far from power laws. If anything, they are lognormal. Watch the Vimeo Clip. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Inspired by Jon Reades’ great visualizations of flows using the TfL Oyster card data, we are now starting to examine the statistical properties of the data, beginning with an analysis of what goes on in the nodes. The data yields …
Continue reading »Bit of an experiment really as it is the weekend. Thought I would embed some background music into the website and the album Flux from the indie group Broken Cities reflects the themes of a Science of Cities. And the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Inspired by Victor Gruen’s heart of the city posted here a little while ago, Jon Reade’s 24 hour movie of traffic on London’s railways (tube+overground) moves us a little closer to Leonardo’s analogy of the city as body. More biology perhaps … Continue reading →
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