The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
My new book is published on 11th December 2018 in the US and on the 8th January 2019 in the UK We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems … Continue reading →
Just published: a special Issue of Philosophical Transactions B (The Royal Society) on ‘Interdisciplinary approaches for uncovering the impacts of architecture on collective behaviour’. My own contribution is ‘open access’ and you can read it and print it from the web … Continue reading →
This conference is the seventh in a by-now very well established meeting held each June in Cambridge UK, which brings together those working on land use transport interaction/integration models (LUTI models) in the narrower sense and more generally on urban … Continue reading →
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 →
Infrastructure has become another hot word in post-industrial economies that are busy figuring out how they can renew all the physical plant that was constructed during their industrial past. The UK has established a National Infrastructure Commission amidst a flurry … Continue reading →
Visited the Urban Dynamics Institute (UDI) headed up Budhendra Bhaduri (Budhu) which is a rapidly growing effort in data-driven technologies applicable to cities. This group which is based at Oakridge National Labs which began life in the war years as part of … Continue reading →
The IPHS (International Planning History Society) has conferred one of its 2018 book prizes on Trixi Haselberger’s edited collection of the thoughts and reflections of some 16 of us who gathered in Vienna in 2014. I myself am not keen … Continue reading →
I should not say this but I don’t remember much about writing the attached piece which is entitled ‘Technology and the Democratic Management of Urban Complexity’ but here it is: click here. Published by Acciona and from a book entitled … 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 →
read my editorial in EPB: Urban Analytics and City Science, and also check out the fact that it is almost 50 years from when Alan Wilson started Environment and Planning (A) and 45 from when Lionel March started B. The … Continue reading →
Here is a useful and interesting book on the nature of planning knowledge and research. My own contribution – click here to get the original PDF – is about scientific method and how theory and models pertain to the field … 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 →
The Editor of Landscape and Urban Planning has chosen our paper by Stephen Marshall and myself on Patrick Geddes as Editor’s choice. Our prize is that you can download it free from here and I do not have to post it … Continue reading →
I gave two lectures on our smart cities projects to Geography at Nanjing Normal University and to a selection of researchers at Shenyang Jianzhu University drawn from architecture, urban planning, transport and GIS on the 25th and 27th September 2017. I … Continue reading →
A new book on data and big data in the city edited by Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauriault, Gavin McArdle from Routledge. Lot of very interesting material here on the data revolution in cities. Smart cities concepts are explained and critiqued … Continue reading →
A paper originating from our EU FP7 Insight project on extending land use transportation models to embrace better sub models of the retailing sector. Our paper entitled “Quantifying Retail Agglomeration using Diverse Spatial Data” by Duccio Piovani, Vassilis Zachariadis and … Continue reading →
Questioning what bigness means in terms of Big Data and the City is a key quest in understanding what the massive increase in data volumes means to understanding the urban challenges that lie ahead and our future planning of the … Continue reading →
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In this paper (downloadable here), I argue that the smart cities movement is simply the latest stage in the massive dissemination of digital computation that began with its invention some 70 or more years ago. In fact, the key thesis … 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 →
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In November 1986 I visited SunYatSen University and gave a public lecture about Urban Modelling. China was a very different world then, no cars, no computers, no email, barely functioning electricity. And of course it was before laptops, networks, hand-held … 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 »Read our paper by Batty, Lin and Chen on Virtual Realities, Analogies and Technologies in Geography, where we continue to parade the idea of virtual geographic environments – VGE From the publisher’s blurb: This Handbook offers an insightful and comprehensive overview from … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This great book edited by Jeffrey Johnson, Paul Ormerod, Bridget Rosewell, Andrzej Nowak, and Yi-Cheng Zhang brings together many contributions from an EU project which lead to several workshops and conferences about a new form of social science – out … 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 »Click on the picture or on this link to by the book online. The project has a web site – click here for the web site and the wider context from which this extract is taken. And take a look inside … 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 »Michael Batty is working on a project with colleagues from the University of Melbourne, UNC at Chapel Hill, and the Santa Fe Institute at the Galapagos Science Centre with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. They are exploring the way human … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Look at the current issue of Built Environment. Papers from CASA and CASA alumni here as well as several others. “Big data is everywhere, largely generated by automated systems operating in real time that potentially tell us how cities are … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Science celebrates the goal of parsimony. Occam’s razor and all that. Indeed I wrote an editorial about this a few years ago in 2010 (click here). The idea rests on assumptions that our best theories are those that strip away … 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 »Giving a paper on Thursday 2nd June in London at Modelling World. Talking about Complexity in Land Use Transport Interaction (LUTI) Modelling, outlining very briefly our QUANT model for the Future Cities Catapult. This model is designed to simulate employment … Continue reading →
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This past semester I gave a new class at GMU entitled “Urban Analytics”. In a nutshell the class was about introducing students to a broad interdisciplinary field that focuses on the use of data to study cities. More specifcally the emphasis of the cla…
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This past semester I gave a new class at GMU entitled “Urban Analytics”. In a nutshell the class was about introducing students to a broad interdisciplinary field that focuses on the use of data to study cities. More specifcally the emphasis of the cla…
Continue reading »A couple of months ago I attended a meeting at Wilton Park in Sussex organised by the Uk Government’s Tech City Hub (http://www.techcityuk.com/) and a cloud computing company called Improbable (http://improbable.io/) specialising in massively parallel agent based modelling (for cities, transport, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Yesterday I gave a talk on driven models to the Hong Kong Poly U Department of Land Surveying and Geomatics, and today at at 2-30pm in Geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. When I got to the Poly U yesterday – and I … 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 idea. Michael Mehaffy has put together a superb collection of comments on Chris Alexander’s famous 1965 paper “A City is Not a Tree”. The comments which are presented in slightly longer papers and shorter contributions are from those … 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 »You may think that this blog has enough on ‘models’ to sink a ship and I have a new editorial on this in EPB. But there is a wonderful article by Paul Krugman on models which I have just come across although written two decades or so ago. Krugman … Continue reading →
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