The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
How is that a niche research area such as the shape and form of cities using various mathematical and formal principles in geometry, allometry, scaling and social physics can have several distinct approaches that never refer to one another? Fractals … 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 »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 »Someone from ETH Zurich Future Cities Lab showed me a fascinating book by Serge Salat called Cities and Forms (Hermann Editions, Paris, 2011). Haven’t managed to get it (ugh! French Publishers!) but downloaded his paper “Systemic Resilience of Complex Urban Systems: … 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 »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 »Jason Silva’s wonderful demonstration of patterns and order across many evolving spatial systems is what our science of cities is all about: flows, interactions, dynamics, self-similiarity, hierarchy and of course fractals. Take a look. These patterns swirl around all our … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Brian Berry has followed up his Cities as Systems within Systems of Cities paper published in 1964 in the Papers & Proceedings of the Regional Science Association with a great review of the city size debate in Current Research in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »James Canton in a prescient article in Significance argues that cities will diversify as they get larger. Like Dobbs & Remes in their McKinsey report, he argues there is effectively no limit on their growth. At least not in terms … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Here is my lecture given at the North American Regional Science Association Annual Conference in Miami, 11th Nov 2011. It is as good a summary as I can muster of complexity theory applied to cities & regions. I focus on … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Martin Austwick has an interesting piece on defining complexity which is what I am trying to do in my Spatial Complexity course. If you click on the link to the left or here, there is a small comment about entropy … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Click left for the lecture or above on Lecture 7. More on entropy and information here, and I rework some of the material of Lecture 6. Note the random collisions model and run Chen’s online movie and have look at … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The icon left is rather appropriate for Arizona and the wild west, don’t you think. Entropy is increasing as we head towards the end of the course. The sixth lecture deals with our third form of scaling, scaling with space, … 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 →
Continue reading »You can now download the second lecture from the Menu Item above, Lecture 2, or by clicking the icon to the left of this post. More bibliography is on its way and this second lecture focuses on patterns and fractals as well … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Started my new lecture course on Spatial Complexity at Arizona State University. It’s killing me doing relatively new stuff day after day. Lectures are posted after given: Seven so far, the last on Wednesday (2/11) (at http://www.spatialcom…
Continue reading »Several previous posts suggest that our Science of Cities is more like Biology than Physics but Social Physics has a long history. CASA’s Martin Austwick recently gave an impromptu review from Quetelet’s original definition to Comte’s rebuttal. Useful definitions from Stewart … 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 →