The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
After spending a rather enjoyable few days at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Tampa where there were some great talks on agent-based modeling, GIS and many other topics which I find interesting, along with catching up wi…
Continue reading »Tel Aviv is fast becoming an ever more powerful symbol of high tech. In the 1920s before the establishment of the Israeli state, it was famed for its rapid development in the Bauhaus style, and our predecessor at UCL Sir … Continue reading →
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I’ve been modelling the interconnected nature of the global economy by simulating a reduction in demand for various sectors in various countries. It’s a very simple little piece of analysis: What would happen if the demand for a given sector in a given country was reduced by a single US dollar? In answering this question […]
Continue reading »A fascinating virtual lab pulling together research in urban science focussed on researchers from several Chinese universities and agencies in Beijing. From their site, they say “The Beijing City Lab (BCL) is a virtual research community, dedicated to studying, but … 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 »Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros have written a nice paper on networks which is the online journal Biourbanism. They quote from E. Forster who made much in stories of the fact that we need to ‘connect’. His novella The Machine … 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 »Andre Svetsuk and the City Form Lab have just announced the Urban Networks Analysis Toolbox v1.01 for ArcGIS. This can be downloaded free. The following text is from their web site. As the first of its kind, this ArcGIS toolbox can be … 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 »The paper we published in PLOS ONE last week covers bike share schemes from five cities: the large ones in London and Washington, DC, and smaller ones in Boston, Minneapolis, and Denver. It might seem odd that we’ve chosen these … Continue reading →
The paper we published in PLOS ONE last week covers bike share schemes from five cities: the large ones in London and Washington, DC, and smaller ones in Boston, Minneapolis, and Denver. It might seem odd that we’ve chosen these … Continue reading →
The paper we published in PLOS ONE last week covers bike share schemes from five cities: the large ones in London and Washington, DC, and smaller ones in Boston, Minneapolis, and Denver. It might seem odd that we’ve chosen these … Continue reading →
Riccardo Maria Pulselli from the Ecodynamics Group at the University of Siena has put his fascinating book on urban kinetics online. Click here to view. In it he demonstrates that cities are never in equilibrium, they are always changing, and … Continue reading →
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Networks: aren’t they great? The sexiest modelling paradigm around at the moment and there are no shortage of social science researchers itching to jump on the bandwagon. Never one to drag my heels, I blogged last week about the attempts by me and my colleagues to bring network science into Economics, and included a fancy […]
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 »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 »CSIRO are running a workshop in their Science Frontier Symposium in central Melbourne from today 12th to friday 14th June. I am talking about a Science of Cities this afternoon at 3-30 in Melbourne Town Hall with Peter Newman and Bob … Continue reading →
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 »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 »Note: this was previously posted at simulacra.info, but I am in the process of (re)organising my technical notes and tutorials. After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with … 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 »Presenting this morning at ESRI Geodesign Summit with the title Simulating Geodesign: Agents as Designers, Agents as Buildings. Click on the pdf to get a sense of what this is about. Most geodesign is the application of spatial analytics and … 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 »Here is a short one page missive from me printed in this month’s (January 2013) issue of Geographical (magazine) which argues the case for getting involved in these questions. Can’t find the online content (and we don’t seem to have … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Dave Banister’s group at Oxford have just started a seminar series on new approaches to transport and mobility modelling called “Modelling on the Move” and two of us from UCL, myself and Peter Jones from the Centre for Transport Studies talked … 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 »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 »After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with Python and iGraph since I really need to produce multiple iterations of a graph. The matmos at CASA have, of course, been touting Python for ages, but I’ve just not had the time/incentive to install […]
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 »Robert Kosara has produced some really neat maps of connected places on his blog ‘eager eyes’ where he connects “all the ZIP or postal codes in a country in ascending order”. The UK is rather integrated it seems compared to other countries. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Welcome to Singapore, The Intelligent Island. No not the sign greeting you at Changi when you land now but the sign back in 1989 which we show to the left. For the last 25 years, Singapore has been in the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In researching for my talk at Peter Hall’s 80th Birthday Symposium this coming Monday in UCL’s Darwin Lecture Theatre, I came across Raymond Unwin’s book Town Planning in Practice – An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A deluge of data makes cities laboratories for those seeking to run them better. Nice summary from Ludwig Siegele in this week’s Economist, online version I think. Merging smart cities and new scaling laws. And reference to the forthcoming meeting … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My talk at CPGIS this morning is about how we might use all our new flow data to build new models to explore how city systems fail. This is more a talk about what we would like to do, rather … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Geoff West of the Santa Fe Institute talks about scaling, networks and cities, emphasizing that cities scale more than proportionately with respect to creative pursuits, inventions, patents, specialist services and income. Watch the video on YouT…
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 »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 »Material and people flows in cities show atoms are bonded together but money and information flows have much greater resonance. The great challenge is not only to build good economic flow models but first to observe and measure them. Pioneering … Continue reading →
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