Visualisation Projects by CASA Urban Spatial Science Students

Each year CASA master’s students demonstrate their spatial data visualisation skills with a group project. The theme this year was ‘Urban Futures’, and students have produced some very impressive and diverse work, experimenting with a range of visualisation tools and techniques. Click on the images below to visit the project websites. Urban Resilience ProjectsTwo groups … Continue reading Visualisation Projects by CASA Urban Spatial Science Students

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Measuring Comparative Public Transport Accessibility for GB Cities

While Greater London has a comprehensive transit network, this is not a fair representation of UK cities where underinvestment and privatisation has seen many bus, metro and rail networks stagnate in recent decades, falling well behind European and Asian peers. Improving public transport is an important aspect of addressing the UK’s high regional inequality and … Continue reading Measuring Comparative Public Transport Accessibility for GB Cities

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Can the Green Belt be Developed Sustainably to Ease London’s Housing Crisis?

The housing crisis in London has become increasingly severe in the last decade with much higher prices, rents, and largely static incomes, while housing development volumes have remained consistently below targets. Green Belt reform is often cited as a solution to boost development, though this has been off the agenda during the last 13 years … Continue reading Can the Green Belt be Developed Sustainably to Ease London’s Housing Crisis?

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World Population Density Map Update with GHSL 2023

The European Union JRC recently released a new 2023 update of the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) data. This update has greatly improved the GHSL data, with a 10m scale built-up area dataset of the entire globe which has been used to create a 100m scale global population density layer. The level of detail for … Continue reading World Population Density Map Update with GHSL 2023

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Post-Pandemic Changes in Travel Behaviour: Evidence from the National Travel Survey England 2021

The pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have seen the largest and most sustained disruptions to travel behaviour in most of our lifetimes. Stay-at-home policies have fuelled an explosion in remote working, and wider online substitution of other activities such as shopping and socialising. In sustainability terms, the pandemic has severely hit public transport and incentivised car … Continue reading Post-Pandemic Changes in Travel Behaviour: Evidence from the National Travel Survey England 2021

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Global Visualisation Websites from CASA MSc students

Each year MSc students at CASA demonstrate their visualisation skills with a group project. The theme this year was ‘Global to Local’, and the class of 2022 has produced some particularly excellent work, experimenting with a range of visualisation tools and techniques. Sustainability VisualisationsSeveral groups interpreted the main theme in terms of sustainability and climate … Continue reading Global Visualisation Websites from CASA MSc students

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A Compact City for the Wealthy? Continuing Inner London Gentrification and Impacts on Accessibility Inequalities

We have a new open access paper out in the Journal of Transport Geography- “A compact city for the wealthy? Employment accessibility inequalities between occupational classes in the London metropolitan region 2011“. The paper explores how the increasingly affluent nature of Inner London has improved sustainable travel opportunities for more affluent professional and management classes, … Continue reading A Compact City for the Wealthy? Continuing Inner London Gentrification and Impacts on Accessibility Inequalities

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Planning a Cycling Revolution for Post-Lockdown London

Overview London and the UK as a whole have been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, creating multiple health, social and economic crises. Social distancing requirements have drastically reduced the safe capacity of public transport services. The London Mayor and Transport for London (TfL) have quickly responded with a radical plan for transforming Inner London … Continue reading Planning a Cycling Revolution for Post-Lockdown London

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UCL Sustainability week – a global university that is also Sommers Town local university

UCL is marking its sustainability week between 29th October and 4th November. As part of the activities to mark the Green UCL initiative. I was interviewed to this video, together with other researchers and professional staff who are committed to integrating sustainability into their work. The video was shot around UCL and the nearby area. … Continue reading UCL Sustainability week – a global university that is also Sommers Town local university

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Global Prospects for a Post-Car World

Earlier this year I worked on some charts and maps for a Greenpeace report authored by sustainable transport academic Robin Hickman, exploring the impacts of automobile dependence and the prospects for a post-car world. The report is online here. The much debated phenomenon of ‘peak-car’ can be observed in many countries in the global north, … Continue reading Global Prospects for a Post-Car World

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World Population Density Interactive Map

A brilliant new dataset produced by the European Commission was recently released- the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL). This is the first time that detailed and comprehensive population density and built-up area for the world has been available as open data. As usual, my first thought was to make an interactive map, now online at- http://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ … Continue reading World Population Density Interactive Map

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Understanding Household Energy Use in England & Wales

Household energy use is a key indicator for understanding urban sustainability and fuel poverty, and is a timely topic now that winter has arrived. The LuminoCity3D site maps domestic energy use in England and Wales at 1km2 scale using data from DECC. This map has also just been published as a featured graphic in Regional Studies Regional Science.…

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Is Developing the Greenbelt the Answer to London’s Housing Crisis?

Following rapid growth and a chronic lack of new development, housing affordability has reached crisis levels in London. Median house prices are at £300k (8 times median household income) while average prices have passed half a million. London is now amongst the most expensive cities in the world, a situation with severe consequences for economic competitiveness and…

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CHI 2013: sustainability, development and activism

As I’ve noted in the previous post, I have just attended CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference for the first time. It’s a fairly big conference, with over 3000 participants, multiple tracks that evolved over the 30 years that CHI have been going,  including the familiar paper presentations, panels, posters and courses, but also the less familiar […]

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Sparks of Inspiration at the Electric City Conference

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

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Urban Age Electric City Conference

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

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Copenhagen and Hong Kong: Mapping Global Leaders in Green Transport

Cities that achieve social and economic success without high car use generally have three things in common: high densities, good urban design, and successful planning frameworks that integrate land-use with public transport, walking and cycling networks. I’ve been working on an LSE Cities project that investigated two leading global cities in green transport- Copenhagen and … Continue reading

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Carbonchart: Why are Global CO2 Emissions Soaring?

As the costs of recent droughts spiral from USA to Australia, West Africa to India, we’re getting a taste of what a significantly warmer climate would be like. Critically as the scientific evidence mounts up that climate change is occurring, global carbon dioxide emissions are soaring. Why is this? I’ve designed a new website Carbon … Continue reading

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Automobile 2.0: Electrification, Sharing and Self-Drive

  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 »

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Visualising Flows 2: the Global CO2 Emissions Supply Chain

Every so often you come across a dataset that really amazes you in its richness and ability to change perspectives on understanding the world. One such dataset has been produced by academics at Stanford and Oslo tracing the global supply chain of CO2 emissions. Traditionally emissions are attributed to countries depending on where fuels are … Continue reading »

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Book – Four to Start into the New Year

From sustainability to the new beauty in the following four books are put forward to start into 2012. The topics all address some of the concerns raised about cities in the past year or so and all contribute to the current discussion around changes in social and spatial organisation at large. With globalisation and technology social structures are changing requiring urban environments to be adapted. This will not happen tomorrow, nor is it a case of restarting in building it new from scratch. The only option is to keep transforming and by testing and engaging with the presented new thoughts and aspects we might take a step into this direction.

Not all cities are mega cities. In fact most of the cities are small to mid sized. According to the work Mike Batty had done together with Martin Austwick and Oliver O’Brian on Rank Clocks plotting city sizes in the US, only about 10% of the cities are mega or large. The rest of the cities are under 1 million in population size.

In terms of sustainability potential these large numbers of smaller cities could actually play a major role and this is what Catherine Tumber put forward in her publication Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World published by MIT Press.

There are so many problems the smaller cities face. From long terms decline due to the faltering of industries, massive transport infrastructures slicing them into non workable urban islands and social struggles related to working poor and general poverty reminiscent of postcolonial squalor. The biggest struggle however is the fact that they are excluded from the general debate of urban planning and theoretical thinking. They all practice urban planning and development, but with only little recognition and background.

Tumber argues that due to the smaller sized, shorter distances and proximity to farmland and recreation these smaller cities have a lot of potential to implement sustainable concepts and start integrating those in everyday urban practice. Tumber especially points to renewable energies, such a wind, food production and local agriculture as well as manufacturing skills. Its all about producing and consuming locally.

These ideas are not new and sort of resonate with early garden cities ideas, especially in the praise of size and population density. This is not at all a negative association, but more a practical application. Since here it is not about setting up a new place to live, which can in itself not be sustainable, but about reprogramming an existing one sustainability is given an additional dimension.

Small, Gritty, and Green Book cover
Image taken from archpaper / Small, Gritty, and Green, book cover, part.

Does a city posses its very own spirit and identity? Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit argue in their new book The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age published by Princeton University Press that actually they do. The authors draw on the ancient Greek concept of city spirit and argue for the rediscovery of the local urban spirits around the world especially in connection to todays globalisation.

Earlier publications have picked up on this topic and characterised cities in such a manner as to work out distinct identities. Saskia Sassen in Cities in a World Economy and more recently Martina Löw in Soziologie der Städte
(sociology of cities). THe concept of the citiy spirit is, as Löw points out, closely entangled with the city marketing that has been very popular in the past fifteen years as a tool to distinguish, present and attract.

Bell and de-Shalit look specifically at nine modern cities: Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism), Beijing (political power), Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance) and New York (ambition). Of course soe of them sound like external concepts. Especially Paris and the age old topic of romance, hey but never mind it shapes the place in a certain way and this identity hold the potential to develop something specific and relevant.

Each city is portrait in a lot of detail making good use of story telling as well as combining theoretical aspects with practical experience. A good read for travellers of thought.

The Spirit of Cities Book cover
Image taken from the Atlantic / The Spirit of Cities, book cover.

“We have to find our way back to beauty!” Lars Spuybroek argues in his new book The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design, published by V2_publishing, for a revised approach to design culture moving away from the technological practice of modernism towards a more romantic notion of art in the sense that beauty always combines variations, imperfection and fragility. Spuybroek bases his arguments on John Ruskin‘s aesthetics. Overall the book is a project to wrest these topics out of the Victorian era into the present. This is achieved by combining the five central themes of Ruskin: the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time and ecology and design in combination with more recent thoughts on aesthetics by philosophers such as William James and Bruno Latour.

It becomes a projection of a world of feeling and beauty in such a way as it completely does a way with the fundamentalism and absolutism of modernist conception of design.

The Sympathy of Things Book cover
Image taken from il giornale dell architettura / The Sympathy of Things, book cover.

Graphical representation of information are in every case an abstract representation. Often to represent a point of view or a standpoint is required and depending on this the representation is biased. In Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display published by Princeton University Press, Howard Wainer is looking at the phenomenon of information display of statistical data and the possible complications.

The book is less about graphics than numbers, although graphics do play an important role. Similar to Dona M. Wong’s Guide to Information Graphics and also like Tufte’s Books The Visual Display of Information and Envisioning Information the correct representation is at the heart of the text. However, Wainer focuses more on the conditions and the explanations than the design.

Wainer is a longtime expert in statistical graphics who works as a research scientist for the National Board of Medical Examiners and as an adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The examples are discussed in detail in order to really get the reader to understand the points Wainer is to make. This has the advantage that for a number of the examples the reader also comes to finally understand the actual meaning of the graph probably well known to him. The book draws from a great range of examples including Charls Joseph Minard’s plot of Napoleons Russian Campaign, Florence Nightingale’s Diagram of Mortality and William Playfair’s Wheat Prices graph to name a few.

The book is written in a very accessble language and takes time to explain the details as well as linking it with current facts and events that enlighten the presented problem further. Definitely a great read for data enthusiasts.

Picturing the Uncertain World Book cover
Image taken from Borders / Picturing the Uncertain World, book cover.

Wainer, H., 2009. Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Bell, D.A. & de-Shalit, A., 2011. The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Spuybroek, L., 2011. The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design, Rotterdam: V2_Publishing.

Tumber, C., 2011. Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World, Boston, MA: MIT Press.

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