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 →
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 →
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 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 »This coming month (January 2017) sees the launch of another of Nature’s flagship journals Nature Human Behaviour. In it, Andres Gomez-Lievano, Oscar Patterson-Lomba, and Ricardo Hausmann explore an integrated model which explains the prevalence, scaling and variance of urban phenomena … 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 »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 »Paolo Masucci led this study based on defining city boundaries – one of the key research issues in CASA on our Mechanicity project – introducing a really simple idea that cities grow to a condensation threshold after which the city is … 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 »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 »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 »Our work on attempting to repeat the work of the Santa Fe group who show that as cities get bigger (primarily for the USA) they get more than proportionately richer, has drawn a massive blank for the UK urban system (England … 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 »An interesting new book by Shi-Kung Lai and Haoying Han which weaves together their various papers which range from strict cellular automata models of urban processes to models of organisational structures such as Cohen’s decision-making model applied to planning (The … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This past week I have been giving the Israel Pollack distinguished lecture series at Technion in Haifa, the School of Architecture and Town Planning, talking about smart cities and big data (PDF here), and rank clocks and scaling (PDF here). … 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 »Friday December 6th I presented a TEDxLondon talk in the City 2.0 series. I must admit then when they invited me to present something on cities, I thought they had mistaken me for …. well, it was a surprise, anyway, … 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 »At ECCS ’13 this morning, Elsa Arcaute, Lecturer in Urban Modelling in CASA, is talking about our work on city size using percolation theory which has analogies to Hernan Makse’s work on percolation and the brain. Click here for the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »For many years, almost from the time when Newton first presented his laws of gravitation, speculations and applications of the gravity model to human interactions have been made. In the 19th century, Carey and Ravenstein led the way with Reilly, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Luis Bettencourt’s paper in Science on The Origins of Scaling in Cities and my commentary on it called a Theory of City Size are summarised in a rather nice piece from Rachel Ehernberg in this week’s Science News where she … 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 »Check out our paper in Scientific Reports published on the 6th November. Click to Open Access, so no fear of breaking copyright by reading it ! What a surprise. We or rather a grant paid for it. What we argue … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Lots of CASA people speaking at the European Conference of Complex Systems at the Free University in Brussels this week. Elsa Arcaute and the Mechanicity team are talking on Scaling Laws in Cities: Is there Universality? Today (Tuesday 4th) at … 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 »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 »Agent-Based Models or Modelling, abbreviated ABM , involves developing simulations of urban structure and dynamics at the level of how individual objects which comprise such systems behave. The best example and the one that is developed in my lecture today … 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 »You can now download the fourth lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 4, or click the icon to the left of this post. This lecture continues the first kind of scaling based on size distributions focussing on names, high … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You can now download the third lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 3, or click the icon to the left of this post. This lecture focuses on the first kind of scaling which pertains to city size distributions. We look at … Continue reading →
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