The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 →
Two new volumes in big data, cities and regions, with a strong spatial focus. The first Seeing Cities Through Big Data: Research, Methods and Applications in Urban Informatics’ is edited by Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah, Nebiyou Tilahun, and Moira Zellner and published … Continue reading →
This article took 5 years in the making. We – Urskar, Jon, Ed, and myself – thought that it was a great project to see what was big data on taxi flows in central London in 1962 could be compared … 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 »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 »Chen Zhong is leading CASA’s work in measuring variability and regularity in big data from automated capture of travel demand on subway systems in three world cities. This paper in PLOS One is our first on a comparison of tap … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Giving two lectures by video at the E-Life Congress in Athens on November 6th and at the ITF-OECD Roundtable on 21st Century Public Interest Data Sharing on November 9 in Paris. The lectures are more or less the same and mirror that … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Paolo Masucci led this study based on defining city boundaries – one of the key research issues in CASA on our Mechanicity project – introducing a really simple idea that cities grow to a condensation threshold after which the city is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Five lecture sessions starting tonight at 6-00pm at Arizona State University to a graduate class of geographers and planners on Smart Cities. Monday, Wednesday and Friday this week and Wednesday and Friday the following week. Two lectures per session for … 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 »Our new paper reports research on the definition of cities led by A. Paolo Masucci with Elsa Arcaute, Jiaqiu Wang, Erez Hatna, Kiril Stanilov and Michael Batty. Its in the arXiv and you can get it here from this link. Here is the abstract: Urban morphology has presented significant … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Once in a while along comes a wonderful piece of historical research that again illustrates that in most fields, there is little new under the sun. Andrew Odlyzko’s recent paper entitled “The forgotten discovery of gravity models and the inefficiency … Continue reading →
Continue reading »….. is a short article by Richard Sennett in the LSE Cities’ programs current Urban Age magazine Governing Urban Futures. He makes the point that all the hype about big cities wanting their own governance is somewhat put into the shade … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Absolutely the best thing to read on the corporate hype and innuendos from the big computer companies pedalling the idea of ‘the smart city’. Adam Greenfield’s new book – that you can only get on Kindle and which was my … Continue reading →
Continue reading »“The city is not only a community, it is a conflux. ….The real city, as a center of industry, is a conflux of streams of traffic; as a center of culture, it is conflux of streams of thought.” So wrote … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Subtitled “A Festschrift for Professor Peter M. Allen“ You may say ‘I don’t read Festschrifts, stuffy old things for a bygone age. Wrong ! Always wrong and you must read this one! Because here is someone who has had a massive … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The second version of this online course starts on 26th February. Register here. I posted a comment when the course began and that is still relevant. Click for this. There is a shortish neat manual that tells you about last … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Big Data Future is a conference at Ohio State University 19-21 March 2014 hosted by I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society in the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. It is supported by Battelle, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »From 2011 to 2021 London’s population will grow by a million – the fastest rate of acceleration ever. We are going to hit nine million before New York, and approach ten million by 2030. With these demographic projections, we will … 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 »Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass where gentrification combines with public art just north of Brooklyn Heights, I discovered one of the secrets of America in the new world of smart cities, ICT, and citizen science: data streaming. Half a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Mike Batty, Bill Hillier and Stephen Marshall are all presenting at the 2nd Delft Complexity meeting which runs for the next three days at TUDelft. Juval Portugali is the spirit behind these meetings and the edited book from the first … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Andre Svetsuk and the City Form Lab have just announced the Urban Networks Analysis Toolbox v1.01 for ArcGIS. This can be downloaded free. The following text is from their web site. As the first of its kind, this ArcGIS toolbox can be … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Several of us from the Mechanicity and Eunoia Projects are embarked on an expedition to the European Conference on Complex Systems held this year in Barcelona. Tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday, we present in various satellite sessions devoted to Complexity-Net, our … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Urban Systems Collaborative (USC) Annual Meeting Is being held at Imperial College in London today and tomorrow (10-11 September). The meeting is essentially about smart cities but in particular how smart cities affect the quality of life in cities, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Riccardo Maria Pulselli from the Ecodynamics Group at the University of Siena has put his fascinating book on urban kinetics online. Click here to view. In it he demonstrates that cities are never in equilibrium, they are always changing, and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »AESOP-ACSP is the joint European and American Associations of Planning Schools conference held this year in Dublin at UCD. The theme is resilience in cities and how planning might best respond to it. This is a popular term and is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Rob Kitchin’s paper on smart cities focuses on “… how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of … 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 »This is more or less a repeat of my course at ASU earlier this year and although I peppered this with a lot more comment and discussion in terms of the actual presentations to graduates at Tel-Aviv University (TAU), most … Continue reading →
Continue reading »For the online course TechniCity, I have made a little video of Big Data and our Oyster Card project using data from the subway system courtesy of Transport for London, and courtesy of our researcher Dr. Jon Reades. The video … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Presenting this morning at ESRI Geodesign Summit with the title Simulating Geodesign: Agents as Designers, Agents as Buildings. Click on the pdf to get a sense of what this is about. Most geodesign is the application of spatial analytics and … Continue reading →
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 »Dave Banister’s group at Oxford have just started a seminar series on new approaches to transport and mobility modelling called “Modelling on the Move” and two of us from UCL, myself and Peter Jones from the Centre for Transport Studies talked … 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 →
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