The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 →
Continue reading »Joan Serras in CASA is visualising some excellent flow data on the use of 114,000 pubic buses in London over a 24 hour period. Watch his previous Vimeo clip. Soon we will post Jon Reades visulizations of flows on subways … 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 »Satellite Meeting: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics (COSMIC) Location: Brussels, 5th of September 2012 Organizers: Peter Nijkamp, Michael Batty, Stewart Fotheringham, and Emmanouil Tranos Background New bottom up, digital data collected for entire populations, has started being utilised in urban science …
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 »In one of the more unusual invitations that I’ve received over the past few years, I was asked to speak about visualisation and open data at Transport Ticketing 2012, currently happening down in South Ken. Interestingly, in spite of …
Continue reading »Topical visualisations of flows: so simple, so effective. How we can visualise the flow of debt in the west between countries by the BBC and even better by the New York Times which introduces scenarios about future flows, reflecting contagion, phase … Continue reading →
Continue reading »BitCity tomorrow (3rd November) at Columbia (NYC). Click left for my presentation on Cities as Flow Systems. Talks about CASA’s Oyster Card, Bikes, Networks, and LUTI model projects and how they can be used to look at fractured networks. Thanks … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Amazing what you discover when you search the web. Couldn’t find Ravenstein’s 1888 map that Waldo Tobler sent me as a detailed scan. Its framed in my room at UCL and somewhere on the web I know. What I did … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This entry goes to the CASA blog aggregator so those viewing it will be getting a blow by blow account of each lecture as I post it. As I don’t lecture much in CASA, at least it shows when I am … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Many interesting approaches were presented at Strathclyde Complex Transport Networks meeting this week, ranging from slime mould networks to more conventional transportation geometries. Our paper using London Oyster Card data can be downloaded from presentations on this site or by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Use the Player Bar above for Audio. A Webinar to the Urban Systems Collaborative organized by the IBM Smart Cities Group in Armonk, NY focusing on CASA’s work on tracking, measuring, modeling and visualizing city systems. For a glance at the Slides, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The focus is shifting to real time analysis of city systems with many links between urban mobility, energy and ICT. Trantopoulos, Schlapfer and Helbing suggest that the nervous system of a city be explored using ‘Techno-Social Reality Mining’. References to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The TfL Oyster Card Tube and Train flow volumes over 24 hrs at 666 (don’t worry about the number) hubs reveal classic diurnal peaks but the profiles are far from power laws. If anything, they are lognormal. Watch the Vimeo Clip. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Inspired by Victor Gruen’s heart of the city posted here a little while ago, Jon Reade’s 24 hour movie of traffic on London’s railways (tube+overground) moves us a little closer to Leonardo’s analogy of the city as body. More biology perhaps … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A science of cities is rooted in networks that deliver energy and information to the components that make up a functioning urban system. This one page guide takes you to the key sites, people, books, papers, data and software associated … Continue reading →
As cities get bigger, their capacity to innovate (hence their wealth) appears to scale super-linearly (with their size). But the idea that ‘big cities’ have ‘big brains’ and are smarter, is problematic as is their scaling and allometry. Read Changizi … Continue reading →
Constructing flows from where people are located at different points in time is usually hard and often impossible for large populations. You can only do it for individuals if you know the actual locations and order visited: posted on vimeo, … Continue reading →
As many of you know, for quite some time I’ve been wrestling with a massive data set from TfL — I make it that I have 120 million trip segments across 88 million identifiable journeys in the course of just …
Continue reading »In fits and starts, over the past month I’ve been getting to grips with an exciting new Oyster Card data set from TfL and the wonderfully supportive Andrew Gaitskell, their resident Oyster Card data expert. For those few of you …
Continue reading »With the increasingly widespread availability of transport data, we can now visualise and explore new dynamic geographies of urban transport flows and networks. In this post, I show detailed animations of UK multi-modal public transport networks using timetable data. This …
Continue reading »2th – 5th September 2011 – Harokopio University of Athens, Greece
Special sessions:
A. Quantitative methods in health geography
B. Networking the World: Concepts, methods, data
Deadline for abstracts – March 30th 2011
More details can be fo…