The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Suddenly the world seems to have woken up to the fact that we can treat cities as a science. More than 100 years ago, Patrick Geddes said ”Thus, in fact, appear the methods of a Science of Cities …..” in Cities in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Great article from the New York Times cataloguing the many unusual ways in which Mayor Bloomberg’s group of tech savvy professionals are piecing together data from diverse sources to attack some of the cities biggest and most persistent problems. Many … Continue reading →
Continue reading »There is a lot of effort in the current developments involving computers and physics to think about cities as prompting a new kind of science of cities. Luis Bettencourt and Geoff West have argued this in a recent commentary in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Cities are the hot topic of the early 21st century. Read our/my agenda for what we might do. Many groups are now fashioning such an agenda for future cities dealing with every thing from smart cities, big data and simulation to … Continue reading →
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The founder and chair of CASA, Prof. Michael Batty has been awarded the prestigious Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, the highest award that can be gained in the field of geography. This prize is widely known as the “Nobel pri…
Continue reading »Returned from my travels only to be confronted with yet another lecture course which you can get from this blog, but the innovation is that I am backing up the course with the wonderful Santa Fe lectures on complexity led … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Today saw our new paper on the London Riots published as part of the nature series in Scientific Reports. The work began a few months after the events of summer […]
Continue reading »It is a bit of a gamble to tell those who watch our CASA site that I have just started a new lecture course on Smart Cities that I am offering to graduates at ASU. A gamble because Smart Cities … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Here is a short one page missive from me printed in this month’s (January 2013) issue of Geographical (magazine) which argues the case for getting involved in these questions. Can’t find the online content (and we don’t seem to have … Continue reading →
Continue reading »40 years ago, Horst Rittel and Mel Webber published their seminal article entitled Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. In it, they argued that many, if not most, problems in cities that planners were engaged in ‘solving’, tended to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argues that we are coming to the end of more than 200 years of rapid growth in GDP. The third industrial revolution after steam which was the first, and electricity and chemistry, the second, and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »How is that a niche research area such as the shape and form of cities using various mathematical and formal principles in geometry, allometry, scaling and social physics can have several distinct approaches that never refer to one another? Fractals … Continue reading →
Continue reading »“In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together….. “. This comment from Harvard’s Cherry Murray, Dean of Engineering … 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 »Marc Barthelemy from the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IPhT) of the CEA-Saclay (France) presented a very interesting talk on the evolution of spatial networks in cities at CASA last night (November 29). Arguing that spatial networks are often richer and … 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 »One last lecture before I seek landfall back In Blighty after a long trip. Today at Portugal’s oldest University Coimbra (founded 1290). Click to see pdf. This is a reworking of our lecture on real time data analysis of London’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading »12 years ago we held a meeting in CASA on Cellular Automata Models. David O’Sullivan and Paul Torrens, both PhD students at the time – in fact David had finished and it was just before he went to Penn State … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Lots of CASA people speaking at the European Conference of Complex Systems at the Free University in Brussels this week. Elsa Arcaute and the Mechanicity team are talking on Scaling Laws in Cities: Is there Universality? Today (Tuesday 4th) at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Phil Ball’s little book is one of the best summaries I have come across on complexity theory and its applications. This little triumph of clarity argues that society’s problems are those of highly connected systems. The book has been written … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CASA has a new EU (FP7: Future and Emerging Technologies) project called EUNOIA which is about Evolutive User-centric Networks fOr Intraurban Accessibility. The project will run from October 1st 2012 and is worth 268K Euros. It is part of a … 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 →
Continue reading »I wrote the Foreword for this eBook and I think it is Ok for me to let you read what I have written as the book is online. If you click on the image of the book cover above, then … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Full Details of the Meeting are Here Various people from UCL and Kings are contributing to this meeting in Berlin. Mike Batty from CASA is talking on how cities and their evident complexity require big data which is rapidly becoming … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Agent-Based Models or Modelling, abbreviated ABM , involves developing simulations of urban structure and dynamics at the level of how individual objects which comprise such systems behave. The best example and the one that is developed in my lecture today … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Gone are the land use transportation models of the last three weeks and now come cellular automata models (lecture 7), fractal models and morphologies (lecture 8) and next week we will broach agent-based models. Click to get these two lectures. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This code reads in a .csv file called LatLon, expecting two columns with headers – Latitude and Longitude (in WGS84, decimal form). If the script is run in the same […]
Continue reading »A few months ago, I wrote a python script to convert British National grid coordinates (OSGB36) to latitude and longitude (WGS84). A fellow blogger Andrzej Bieniek very kindly pointed out that the algorithm […]
Continue reading »I wonder how long I can carry on working at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and still manage to avoid learning any GIS. This week: Bezier curves, how to […]
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 »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 »EDIT: Andrzej Bieniek brought to my attention that this version is correct to 100m. For a more accurate script (accurate to 5m) see my new post. I have recently started to […]
Continue reading »In the past few weeks our mathmo team: Toby Davies, Peter Baudains and myself, have been looking into some of the reasons why the London riots happened. If we […]
Continue reading »If we’re being accurate, the title should really be “The importance of using appropriate temporal spacing when applying a discretisation to a continuous time scale”. But I felt the above…
Continue reading »ENFOLD: Explaining, modelliNg, and FOrecasting gLobal Dynamics Pablo Mateos participates in a successful CASA-led £2.9 million bid to EPSRC involving seven UCL departments and ten academics. ENFOLD is a multidisplinary five year modelling project funded by EPSRC (£2.9 million FEC) … Continue reading →
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