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 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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »By the end of this century, we will all be living in Cities but what does this really mean? I have given various talks and written various editorials on this prospect but have never really thought much about what this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Carlos, Elsa, Duncan and myself (Mike) decided to explore next week’s British election using some of our social physics, specifically our work on uncovering urban hierarchies through percolation theory, which basically consists on looking at the connectivity of ‘representative’ areas … 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 »Michael Szell from the SENSEable Cities Lab at MIT has given my book a very generous review in this week’s edition of Science (28 February, Volume 343, pp. 970-971) where he suggests that my synthesis defines a way forward for … Continue reading →
Continue reading »UCL has many famous sons. Brian Berry graduated here in 1955 before he went Stateside and Roger Tomlinson, the ‘father of GIS’ who coined the very term in the early 1960s, did his PhD here. Carl Steinitz who is a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A Review of Smart Cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia by Anthony M. Townsend and my own book The New Science of Cities by Michael Batty, by Tim Smedley in New Scientist Magazine issue … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CUSP – New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress – in launching their Masters program in Applied Urban Science and Informatics, have put together a fascinating course called Foundations of Urban Science which is being taught this fall by … 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 »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 »If you click here you can see out paper on the analysis of London’s street network from the 18th century to the modern day. It was published this past week (12th August) in PLoS One and is open access, the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »In 1977, we made a movie about how you build retail spatial interaction models which compute the impacts of new shopping centres on their surroundings. It was made for an Open University Course called Modelling by Mathematics (TM281). It was … 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 »Today our paper about the evolution of world city subway networks is published online in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. We compare a dozen subway networks around the world in large cities using various graph theoretic network measures. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Jason Silva’s wonderful demonstration of patterns and order across many evolving spatial systems is what our science of cities is all about: flows, interactions, dynamics, self-similiarity, hierarchy and of course fractals. Take a look. These patterns swirl around all our … 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 »You can now download the second lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 2, or by clicking the icon to the left of this post. More bibliography is on its way and this second lecture focuses on patterns and fractals as well … Continue reading →
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