The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »Krugman is very, very insightful when it comes to social physics. His NY Times blog on ‘Gravity’ relates to an article by Adam Davidson on how a gravity model is able to simulate trade between a place called Kanesh in … 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 »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 »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 »Our work on attempting to repeat the work of the Santa Fe group who show that as cities get bigger (primarily for the USA) they get more than proportionately richer, has drawn a massive blank for the UK urban system (England … 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 »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 »My talk is here to download as a PDF and at some point the Santa Fe Web Site (which you can get below will have the video. I will post the video too on our CASA web site. My talk at … 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 »Years ago, in 1976 as many of my CASA compatriots know, I was involved in a series of TV programmes called “Modelling by Mathematics”. This was an Open University first level course to teach technology students some ideas about mathematics, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You can now download the fourth lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 4, or click the icon to the left of this post. This lecture continues the first kind of scaling based on size distributions focussing on names, high … Continue reading →
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