The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
The Beijing City Lab now contains nearly 50 papers on how the technologies that form a science of cities are being applied in China. There is an interesting paper by Wang Jingyuan on smart cities that is worth looking at. It is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Matt Zook drew my attention to this paper in an article he and his colleagues recently wrote called The ‘actually existing smart city’. In it, they point to the fact that a science of cities is not new – that it … 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 »I first met Leo Kadanoff in Cambridge, England in the summer of 1974, I think. He would not remember me but he had been invited to give a talk on urban dynamics at the second Cambridge Land Use and Built … 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 »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 »Science and the City is an annual weekend-long hackfest, co-organized by NYU’s ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Programme, and CUSP, the Center for Urban Science and Progress. The theme is citizen science for exploring and improving our urban environment. Some of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Amazingly as far back as January 1967, we were quite literally talking about ‘a science of cities’, using the cliche. Jennifer Light’s book From Warfare to Welfare published in 2003 recounts the optimism of the 1960s in which many believed … 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 »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 »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 »This is the first book on ‘smart cities’. It is a deep and thoughtful critique, as well as an absorbing and personal account. Anthony Townsend tells us how computers and their software and services are being embedded into cities, how we … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I give my Prix Vautrin-Lud Lecture today at 2pm in Saint Die des Vosges where Vautrin Lud organised the production of the first map of America in 1507. This was named after Amerigo Vespucci, an early traveller to America who … 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 →
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The London Thames is a new poster – a small extra […]
Continue reading »The third annual meeting of the USC will be held at Imperial College on 11th and 12th September. The USC is the web forum set up by interested people in the smart cities movement in the US and maintains an … 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 →
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UbiSoft have created this compelling live map of London […]
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 »The biggest data of all comes from online searchers where there are over 2 billion searches a day, for example, on Google. This is what John Battelle has called the database of intentions for it contains a myriad of what we … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In the May Issue of Scientific American, Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute argues that we will get nowhere with big data if we don’t figure out the big theory that needs to go with it. Data and theory … 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 »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 →
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 »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 »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 »… chop the thesis up, scan it, and put it online for all those who should have been reading it this past three decades but couldn’t, wouldn’t, never knew it existed and so on. Or have never read a thesis … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Gave a talk today to the Market Research Society’s meeting on “Generating Value from the 2011 Census: How business can benefit from the new free Census data”. The talk was a compilation of ideas developed by Ollie O’Brien, Steven Gray, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Geodesign is the term coined by Carl Steinitz for the way in which “maps and geography are merging with mathematics and computing” as Jack Dangermond, President of ERSI, says in the Preface to Carl’s new book A Framework for Geodesign: … 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 »Click left for the lecture or above on Lecture 7. More on entropy and information here, and I rework some of the material of Lecture 6. Note the random collisions model and run Chen’s online movie and have look at … Continue reading →
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