The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
These are the notes from an event at UCL on 1st July 2019 part of Scaling (H2020 project) – innovations in Living Labs. The chair was Jack Stilgoe – Associate Professor, Science and Technology Studies, University College London. The second part of it emerged from Tom Wakefield at the ETC group which is looking at early … Continue reading Experiments outside the laboratory: Who should decide? (notes)
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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 →
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 →
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 →
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 »Our paper in Royal Society Open Science is published this week (April 6th 2016). This is one of the major themes in our ERC Project Mechanicity which has sought to explore how we can define and classify cities according to … 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 »A really nice article from Clementine Cottineau, one of our researchers, on how Russia is shrinking (Read in English or French, from Espace Populations Sociétés. Techniques that we may be able to apply in our new Digital Economies research project to shrinking Britain, … 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 »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 »Robin Edwards and myself have improved our visualisation of city size and rank over time and this is now published as a featured graphic in Environment and Planning A in their forthcoming material. It is quite hard to represent three variables in a two-dimensional … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The notion that cities produce ideas goes back to the time when cities first emerged from our nomadic existence. Indeed it appears that human ‘progress’ through development is centred around the production of new ideas or at least the evolution of … 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 »Papers on the notion that physics can help us articulate our understanding of cities are not new but there are several recent commentaries worth looking at. There is a short sharp one pager that articulates the new science of cities as being … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In human systems, defining any of the objects or attributes we work with is plagued with ambiguity. Defining cities is one of the classic problems and here we use percolation theory to ultimately define cities as connected clusters at a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »By the end of this century, we will all be living in Cities but what does this really mean? I have given various talks and written various editorials on this prospect but have never really thought much about what this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Carlos, Elsa, Duncan and myself (Mike) decided to explore next week’s British election using some of our social physics, specifically our work on uncovering urban hierarchies through percolation theory, which basically consists on looking at the connectivity of ‘representative’ areas … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Our new paper reports research on the definition of cities led by A. Paolo Masucci with Elsa Arcaute, Jiaqiu Wang, Erez Hatna, Kiril Stanilov and Michael Batty. Its in the arXiv and you can get it here from this link. Here is the abstract: Urban morphology has presented significant … 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 »Alluvial diagrams were first proposed to represent changes in network structure over time. Robin Edwards from CASA has implemented the tool and has several examples from social and political arrays which he shows in his blog GeoTheory. Rosvall and Bergstrom’s popularisation of … 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 »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 »A new book by David O’Sullivan and George Perry called Spatial Simulation: Exploring Pattern and Process (Wiley, 2013) is an important landmark text for all those involved in CA and ABM. I quote from the back cover: “O’Sullivan and Perry … 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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »Social physics, scaling, urban informatics, energy in cities are all elements of a science of cities. The recent article by Solecki, Seto, and Marcotullio ‘It’s Time for an Urbanization Science’ in the magazine Environment develops yet another notion of what … 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 »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 »Today/this date I give/gave the Dangermond Lecture at University of California Santa Barbara on Explaining the Dynamics of City Size. Here is the PDF and there is a post on the CASA web site with more links to related work, … Continue reading →
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