The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
This question was rarely asked in the 20th century where the focus was on optimum city size. Now cities seemingly can grow forever but as Dobbs and Remes of McKinsey say, as they grow, cities become more ‘complex’. Managing this complexity … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Several previous posts suggest that our Science of Cities is more like Biology than Physics but Social Physics has a long history. CASA’s Martin Austwick recently gave an impromptu review from Quetelet’s original definition to Comte’s rebuttal. Useful definitions from Stewart … Continue reading →
A science of cities is rooted in networks that deliver energy and information to the components that make up a functioning urban system. This one page guide takes you to the key sites, people, books, papers, data and software associated … Continue reading →
An Essay by Koert van Mensvoort, from his blog http://www.nextnature.net/ where he has a lot of interesting material on Simulacra and much else besides. He begins this essay with the following quote: An interviewer once asked Pablo Picasso why he paints such …
Continue reading »Great Talk by Paul Ormerod at Durham on Tipping Points in Financial Systems, quoting Keynes in 1937 who said: “Actually, however, we have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts.” Read … Continue reading →
Great Talk by Paul Ormerod at Durham on Tipping Points in Financial Systems, quoting Keynes in 1937 who said: “Actually, however, we have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts.” Read … Continue reading →
The Urban Systems Collaborative has just launched its blog – ideas about where a science of cities meets planning practice will emerge from this site. Note the focus on Smart Cities, Intelligent Cities, Paul Romer on Charter Cities. Good summary … Continue reading →
Nobel Prize Winner Herbert Simon said, in one of his last contributions: “The theory of complex systems is perhaps going to look more like biology, with its myriad of species and of proteins, than physics, with its overreaching generalizations.” Excellent … Continue reading →
describes a rather innovative approach to designing the organic city. Ten architecture offices in Holland and China built a city in relay through 10 stages effectively mirroring a process of organic emergence rather than a strict top down design. Click … Continue reading →
Written by Victor Gruen in 1964 who said “I can visualize a metropolitan organism in which cells, each one consisting of a nucleus and a protoplasm, are combined into clusterizations to form specialised organs like towns…..” He portrayed this idealised … Continue reading →
As cities get bigger, their capacity to innovate (hence their wealth) appears to scale super-linearly (with their size). But the idea that ‘big cities’ have ‘big brains’ and are smarter, is problematic as is their scaling and allometry. Read Changizi … Continue reading →
Put my experiments with movies online. The current one is that based on linking our desktop LUTI model to Google Earth. Click here. No sound yet and still getting used to the capture. Click to explore the full Tyndall & … Continue reading →
…. according to the great cartographer Arthur Robinson, the two maps of traffic between Dublin and the rest of Ireland by Lt. Harness of the British Army in 1837, are the oldest. Mapped for the Irish Railway Commissioners prior to … Continue reading →
Aaron Koblin has produced some fantastic animations of airline flows reminiscent of some of Joan Serras’ work on our SIMULACRA blog. Check out Aaron’s flow stuff. He uses Google Maps to zoom in and out. Also dig into his web … Continue reading →
For a decade or more, computer scientists have used procedural logics (grammars) to generate urban morphologies. The paper by Li and Miller uses such recursive procedures similar to those we used a while ago to generate fractal cityscapes. Watch their … Continue reading →
Most of urban dynamics involve activities that are in situ already. Here we present a populist foray into simulating the impact of regeneration on Stratford (the site of the Olympics Games) in east London using our Tyndall LUTI model. Read the … Continue reading →
Constructing flows from where people are located at different points in time is usually hard and often impossible for large populations. You can only do it for individuals if you know the actual locations and order visited: posted on vimeo, … Continue reading →
Kiril Stanilov has adapted RIKS METRONAMICA, an established cellular automata (CA) modelling system, to simulate the historical growth of a section of a large world city. The focus is on simulating change from the late 19th century until the modern …
Continue reading »