Biology – The CASA Blog Network

Towards a Science of Cities

Posted on Saturday 16 February 2013 by Michael Batty

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 →

Allometry, Biology, Flows, Fluxes, location, Morphology, Transport

The Urban Morphology Lab

Posted on Monday 13 August 2012 by Michael Batty

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 →

Allometry, Biology, Complex Systems, Evolution, Fractal Geometries, Scaling

Fractal Architecture

Posted on Thursday 19 July 2012 by Michael Batty

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 →

Biology, design, Evolution, Fractal Geometries, Morphology

Simulating Infectious Diseases in Large Cities

Posted on Thursday 19 January 2012 by Michael Batty

We published quite a high profile paper this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Anders Johansson, myself and colleagues wrote a speculative paper on how to generalise the dynamics of SIR (spatial epidemics) models from pedestrian crowding models as part … Continue reading →

Agent Based Models, Biology, Flows, Fluxes, Simulation

Cities as Organisms

Posted on Wednesday 12 October 2011 by Michael Batty

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 →

Biology, energy, Evolution

The Heartbeat of the City

Posted on Tuesday 2 August 2011 by Michael Batty

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 →

Biology, Flows, Fluxes, networks, Transport

On Complexity

Posted on Sunday 10 July 2011 by Michael Batty

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 →

Biology, Complex Systems