The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 »We have a chapter in this new book on London 2062 which is a brief summary of our transport work using big data. The chapter is called Smart London but the book covers a wide array of topics. It is … Continue reading →
Continue reading »There are just some photographs that speak for themselves. Admittedly this van is positioned to watch over 1 World Trade Center but it is quite a surprise if you think it is just another police van when its camera suddenly ascends … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass where gentrification combines with public art just north of Brooklyn Heights, I discovered one of the secrets of America in the new world of smart cities, ICT, and citizen science: data streaming. Half a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This is the first book on ‘smart cities’. It is a deep and thoughtful critique, as well as an absorbing and personal account. Anthony Townsend tells us how computers and their software and services are being embedded into cities, how we … Continue reading →
Continue reading »My current editorial in Environment and Planning B deals with the impact that the technologies we invent have on the very object that we are studying with the same technologies: using computers to study cities that are now composed of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I give my Prix Vautrin-Lud Lecture today at 2pm in Saint Die des Vosges where Vautrin Lud organised the production of the first map of America in 1507. This was named after Amerigo Vespucci, an early traveller to America who … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Urban Systems Collaborative (USC) Annual Meeting Is being held at Imperial College in London today and tomorrow (10-11 September). The meeting is essentially about smart cities but in particular how smart cities affect the quality of life in cities, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Live Singapore is a project run by MIT’s Senseabl […]
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 »This month ESRI made an interesting move into the field of global city data with the launch of Urban Observatory (TM). The site has some great interactive visualisation ideas with simultaneous mapping of three interchangeable cities, linked navigation and indicator selection. It provides an intuitive interface to explore the diverse forms of world cities- Furthermore this … Continue reading →
This month ESRI made an interesting move into the field of global city data with the launch of Urban Observatory (TM). The site has some great interactive visualisation ideas with simultaneous mapping of three interchangeable cities, linked navigation and indicator selection. It provides an intuitive interface to explore the diverse forms of world cities- Furthermore this … 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 »Rob Kitchin’s paper on smart cities focuses on “… how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A variety of interesting papers in Utrecht for the 13th Meeting of Computers in Urban Modelling and Urban Management (July 3-5, 2013). Harry Timmermans gave an interesting keynote “What-ifs, if-whats and maybes : sketch of ubiquitous collaborative decision support technology” which is … 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 »The biggest data of all comes from online searchers where there are over 2 billion searches a day, for example, on Google. This is what John Battelle has called the database of intentions for it contains a myriad of what we … Continue reading →
Continue reading »In the May Issue of Scientific American, Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute argues that we will get nowhere with big data if we don’t figure out the big theory that needs to go with it. Data and theory … Continue reading →
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The UCL Urban Laboratory is a cross-disciplinary initiative that links various research interest in urban issues, from infrastructure to the way they are expressed in art, films and photography. The Urban Laboratory has just published its first Urban Pamphleteer which aim to ‘confront key contemporary urban questions from diverse perspectives. Written in a direct and accessible […]
Short, sharp discussion of smart cities at Coventry University’s Serious Games Institute (this afternoon, May 8th starting at 1pm) with a talk by myself which mirrors my talk to the AGI a couple of months ago in Edinburgh (click here … Continue reading →
Continue reading »“Big Data” and “Smart Cities” a […]
Continue reading »The folks at Redfish Group in Santa Fe, NM have launched simtable which lets users sculpt the landscape and project onto it visual media that is produced by agent-based models of how the landscape changes. Wildfire is their current simulation using … 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 »Great article from the New York Times cataloguing the many unusual ways in which Mayor Bloomberg’s group of tech savvy professionals are piecing together data from diverse sources to attack some of the cities biggest and most persistent problems. Many … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Cities are the hot topic of the early 21st century. Read our/my agenda for what we might do. Many groups are now fashioning such an agenda for future cities dealing with every thing from smart cities, big data and simulation to … 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 »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 »Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argues that we are coming to the end of more than 200 years of rapid growth in GDP. The third industrial revolution after steam which was the first, and electricity and chemistry, the second, and … 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 »“In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together….. “. This comment from Harvard’s Cherry Murray, Dean of Engineering … Continue reading →
Continue reading »You know you’ve attended a good conference when the discussion leaves your head buzzing with new ideas and possibilities, and the debate continues long after the event closes. This was certainly the case at the Urban Age Electric City conference last week, where politicians, academics, designers and technologists met to share, discuss and argue urban … Continue reading →
I recently began a new job at LSE Cities and have been working for the last month on materials for the Electric City conference in London, taking place on the 6th and 7th December this week. The conference will be exploring smart cities and disruptive urban tech from a sociological slant, and includes talks from … Continue reading →
One last lecture before I seek landfall back In Blighty after a long trip. Today at Portugal’s oldest University Coimbra (founded 1290). Click to see pdf. This is a reworking of our lecture on real time data analysis of London’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Jon Reades and myself gave a talk at ECCS on how we are using our Oyster Card data to simulate disruptions to the London tube system. Added Richard Milton’s real time tube and bus data and presented our ideas at … Continue reading →
Continue reading » Despite the litany of sins levelled at the automobile- it’s woeful energy efficiency, harmful pollution, congestion, road casualties, damage to public space, contribution to obesity- we are still wedded to the car. In the UK the car accounts for over three quarters of trip miles. The flexibility, security and door-to-door convenience of automobile travel remains … Continue reading »
Check out the Future Cities Lab established by ETH Zurich in Singapore. Many projects dealing with every aspects of the city-state but relevant to our own work on land use transport and mobility is their MATSims model which is now running … 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 »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 →
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