The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
The Urban Transformations Consortium’s Conference on the theme of the ‘Good City’ was held in Oxford last week from April 18thto 20th. A variety of approaches to cities were presented with panel sessions devoted to healthy cities, shelter and ownership, … Continue reading →
A new paper from our group. Click here for the paper and also for the issue of Environment and Planning B . Abstract: Agglomeration economies are a persistent subject of debate in regional science and city planning. Their definition turns on … Continue reading →
This new book edited by Tigran Haas and Hans Westlund from KTH is a collection of interesting and somewhat oblique essays on the urban world we have entered. Lot of people you know writing here. Ed Glaeser, Richard Florida, Patrick … Continue reading →
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Regional Studies, the Book Reviews section of the journal has published a series of reviews of books originally published decades ago, and whose influence has grown sufficiently that they are considered classics and milestones … Continue reading →
I hope more people (>2) see this post than actually attended the four lectures celebrating the contribution of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson at this year’s RGS-IBG conference last Thursday when we presented. But such is the state of the world and … Continue reading →
Fulong Wu and his colleagues from the Bartlett School of Planning together with Peking University with several sponsors (see web site) ran a great meeting Friday and Saturday 5-6 May in UCL which gathered together some 200 researchers and academics … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This year is the 50th Anniversary of Regional Studies, the journal. Peter Hall was the first editor and my early years as a lecturer coincided with his stewardship of the journal and his role as Head of Department of Geography … Continue reading →
Continue reading »City Analytics: An invited special collection of articles for Royal Society Open Science entitled ‘City Analytics’ compiled and edited by Desmond J. Higham, Michael Batty, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Danica Vukadinovic Greetham and Peter Grindrod. Click here or on the image … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This coming month (January 2017) sees the launch of another of Nature’s flagship journals Nature Human Behaviour. In it, Andres Gomez-Lievano, Oscar Patterson-Lomba, and Ricardo Hausmann explore an integrated model which explains the prevalence, scaling and variance of urban phenomena … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Did you know that there were more murders in the US-Mexico border town Ciudad Juarez in 2010 than civilian deaths in the whole of Afghanistan – 3111 compared to 2421. Mike Batty gave a talk at this meeting which was organised … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Joana Barros and Mike Batty write about their work on the BBC Brasil Web Site. Read their article here which is about how transport segregates people rather than linking them together in cities in Latin America such as Sao Paulo. This … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In 1996, Denise Pumain set up the online journal Cybergeo . When she first proposed this the web was in its infancy and I remember thinking that this was a very high-risk proposal in a world where the notion that we might … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Podcast: Cities as flows in a circular economy Wrote a chapter in the new book from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation which I blogged about earlier – click here for details. But each of the chapters is accompanied by a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Hegel once said that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ and in our world of cities, this seems ever resonant with the problems that we face. Danny Hillis and Neri Oxman have called this the Age of Entanglement and in this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Our paper in Royal Society Open Science is published this week (April 6th 2016). This is one of the major themes in our ERC Project Mechanicity which has sought to explore how we can define and classify cities according to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A really nice article from Clementine Cottineau, one of our researchers, on how Russia is shrinking (Read in English or French, from Espace Populations Sociétés. Techniques that we may be able to apply in our new Digital Economies research project to shrinking Britain, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The new book from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation contains a series of articles on cities and the built environment that relates to renewability and regeneration in terms of energy, information and new ways of conserving both physical and human resources. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In CASA, in a project lead by Clementine Cottineau, we are working how economic and social attributes of cities scale with size. This is one of our longstanding foci in our ERC Mechanicity Work and it will also be central … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My current editorial in Environment and Planning B tracks the massive investments in infrastructure in China which have taken place since the Great Recession of 2007-2008. One of the key features of contemporary economic systems is their volatility with respect … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Our paper on London’s street network has been picked up by various blogs and tweeted as well by Steve Strogatz. The paper “Multifractal to monofractal evolution of the London street network” by Roberto Murcio, Paolo Masucci, Elsa Arcaute, and myself (Michael Batty) … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Robin Edwards and myself have improved our visualisation of city size and rank over time and this is now published as a featured graphic in Environment and Planning A in their forthcoming material. It is quite hard to represent three variables in a two-dimensional … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Ideal Cities, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Tower The Illinois (pictured here), and Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow have fallen out of fashion in recent years. But the rise of the smart city and the notion of the instrumented … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Roberto Murcio led our work on applying ideas of information theory across scales so that mutual information can be transmitted one way, rather than symmetrically. The paper has just appeared in PLOS One. And you can Download the PDF from … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Papers on the notion that physics can help us articulate our understanding of cities are not new but there are several recent commentaries worth looking at. There is a short sharp one pager that articulates the new science of cities as being … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In human systems, defining any of the objects or attributes we work with is plagued with ambiguity. Defining cities is one of the classic problems and here we use percolation theory to ultimately define cities as connected clusters at a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »By the end of this century, we will all be living in Cities but what does this really mean? I have given various talks and written various editorials on this prospect but have never really thought much about what this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Carlos, Elsa, Duncan and myself (Mike) decided to explore next week’s British election using some of our social physics, specifically our work on uncovering urban hierarchies through percolation theory, which basically consists on looking at the connectivity of ‘representative’ areas … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Alluvial diagrams were first proposed to represent changes in network structure over time. Robin Edwards from CASA has implemented the tool and has several examples from social and political arrays which he shows in his blog GeoTheory. Rosvall and Bergstrom’s popularisation of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A spectre is haunting urban growth relating to how development is financed. My current editorial in Environment and Planning B (December 2014, issue 6) discusses the increasing disconnect between demand and supply of new buildings using the example of Wuhan … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Michael Szell from the SENSEable Cities Lab at MIT has given my book a very generous review in this week’s edition of Science (28 February, Volume 343, pp. 970-971) where he suggests that my synthesis defines a way forward for … 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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 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 »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 →
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