The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
The bright red JUMP bikes are alas gone from the streets of London, following the takeover of Uber’s JUMP micromobility division by rival Lime. They may be back on the streets, maybe painted green, soon. But for now, we can view this amazing data…
Continue reading »
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Geography Review is a brand new magazine for sixth formers (grade 12-13 in the US) studying any subject but particularly those who are interested in geography. In the UK geography is one of the top subjects in high school 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 →
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 →
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 »Written a paper on how we can compare and even integrate space syntax with spatial interaction. You can get it here by clicking on this link or on the image above. This is based on the notion that we need … 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 »
Time Out London, the venerable London free magazine, have spotted that everyone in London loves maps, and so have launched a regular London Mapped feature in their City Life section & blog. This week’s map is rather interesting and not one I’ve seen before. It shows ONS 2015 data on net migration between London’s boroughs […]
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 →
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 »There has been much discussion in recent years about the UK ‘productivity puzzle’: the shortfall in productivity between the UK and comparable EU states like Germany and France, with this gap widening in the last decade. One important perspective for understanding productivity relates to skills and education, and how well graduate skills are integrated with businesses and are helping … Continue reading Graduate Mobility and Closing the Productivity Gap for UK Cities →
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 »Vonu Thakuriah, Nebiyou Tilahun and Moira Zellner organized a very successful conference in August 2014 in Chicago. CASA had two papers at the meeting and you can drill down and find them in the Proceedings which you get access to here. … 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 »A picture of the second CBD in Sao Paulo rapidly developing as a major financial-retailing centre in Itaim Bibi some 10 kms south west of the established centre at Paulista. Our ESRC project with the University of Sao Paulo and INPE … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Neat, crisp informative book by Antoine Picon in the AD Primer Series. Gives myself, James Cheshire and Joan Serras a mention too on transit in London and the science of cities but the book is valuable as a quick but meaty … 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 »Chen Zhong (CASA) and her colleagues from ETH and MIT continue to produce interesting analyses from work with the EZ-Link data in Singapore. She introduces some interesting entropy measures along with other indices in revealing centrality in activity patterns. Her paper can … 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 »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 »My European Research Council (ERC) grant comes to an end in 3 months time. You can hear me talk about the project courtesy of an ERC podcast by clicking here but in this post I will tell you what the project … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Programmable City Project is holding a meeting on Data and the City in Maynooth from August 31- September 1st. You can get Rob Kitchin’s and Mike Batty’s papers from this blog but the programme is diverse and the Project … 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 »Asked by Built Environment to review this some 18 months after it was first published, the world of smart cities has moved on so fast at the level of how we use personal devices to navigate, shop, search etc. that Anthony … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Certainly one of the best books ever on transport modelling. We have been waiting for this sort of book for a long time. Anyone who wants to figure out the reasons why different kinds of transport model have been developed … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Last year I published the above graphic, which then got […]
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 »My colleagues Zhao Yiting and Long Ying from the Beijing City Lab have graciously translated our paper called Smart Cities of the Future. I owe them many thanks. It is available in a special issue of the journal Urban Planning International (1673-9493, 2014, … 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 »Andy and myself have done a paper for the Autumn 2014 issue of the Urban Design Journal that explores the range of visual analytics by which we mean visualisations that have an analytical meaning – 3D, maps, graphics, flows and dashboards. You … Continue reading →
Continue reading »