The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 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 →
A new paper from our group. Click here for the paper and also for the issue of Environment and Planning B . Abstract: Agglomeration economies are a persistent subject of debate in regional science and city planning. Their definition turns on … 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 →
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Regional Studies, the Book Reviews section of the journal has published a series of reviews of books originally published decades ago, and whose influence has grown sufficiently that they are considered classics and milestones … 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 →
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 →
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 →
A new book from the Kitchin stable. I have a short chapter in it on smart cities and you can get it here. Over the past decade, a new set of interactive, open, participatory and networked spatial media have become … 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 »Joana Barros and Mike Batty write about their work on the BBC Brasil Web Site. Read their article here which is about how transport segregates people rather than linking them together in cities in Latin America such as Sao Paulo. This … 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 »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 »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 »A couple of months ago I attended a meeting at Wilton Park in Sussex organised by the Uk Government’s Tech City Hub (http://www.techcityuk.com/) and a cloud computing company called Improbable (http://improbable.io/) specialising in massively parallel agent based modelling (for cities, transport, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You may think that this blog has enough on ‘models’ to sink a ship and I have a new editorial on this in EPB. But there is a wonderful article by Paul Krugman on models which I have just come across although written two decades or so ago. Krugman … 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 »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 »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 »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 »A diverse selection of talks on the Science of Cities at the 2015 Conference on Complex Systems, starting this afternoon in the Sheraton Airport Hotel in Tempe AZ Canyon Room. My own talk is about our Future Cities Catapult Land … 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 »An interesting report by Anthony Townsend of Smart Cities fame about the rapid emergence of urban science and the flurry of centres that have grown up in the wake of these new ideas as well as the development of smart … 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 »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 very nicely produced review of geocomputation in this edited book by Chris Brunsdon and Alex Singleton. It covers many interesting new techniques from agent based models to new visual statistics, from crowdsourcing methods to the newer scripting languages that are … 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 »Found myself speaking at a massive extravaganza the 2014 Internet Festival in Pisa this coming Saturday 11th October amongst a fascinating line up. In a session with Laszlo Barabasi, Carlo Mol and Davy Jansenns, about how the physical meets the … 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 »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 »A major problem in understanding contemporary (and future) cities is the fact that they ‘appear’ to be changing faster than we can keep up. Our theories which were culled in the last half century about how cities are spatially organised … 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 →
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