The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
QR Codes on Oxfam Clothes Reveal Celebrities Who Donated Them [VIDEO] MashableOxfam added a digital twist to one of its stores in London earlier this year — one to make high-end fashion stores envious. Take a smartphone picture of the QR …
Continue reading »Updated May 2012 for Lion The secret to getting the MySQL gem to install and function with Ruby 1.9.x on Snow Leopard or Lion is: Install MySQL using the 64-bit .DMG package installer from dev.mysql.com Install Ruby using RVM or (preferably) rbenv Add …
Continue reading »Richard Milton here in CASA has released a new feature on the MapTube website today which will make it easier to create new maps from data in CSV files. The new update to MapTube adds a graphical user interface which allows the user…
Continue reading »We released a new feature on the MapTube website today which will make it easier to create new maps from data in CSV files. The underlying technology is used on the SurveyMapper site and for other real-time visualisations like http://bigdatatoolkit.org/2011/07/26/1yeartogo/ which shows tweets using the #1yeartogo hashtag for the London 2012 Olympics. The new update to […]
Continue reading »The main buzz word of the 2011 discussion in urban and spatial research is networks. Networks start to appear everywhere and everything is linked in to most other things. This is however, in fact not new. The network discussion has started at least ten…
Continue reading »Inspired by Victor Gruen’s heart of the city posted here a little while ago, Jon Reade’s 24 hour movie of traffic on London’s railways (tube+overground) moves us a little closer to Leonardo’s analogy of the city as body. More biology perhaps … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I’ve been working with the TfL data over the past few weeks to better understand the geographical distribution of journeys and how this affects the load on individual segments across the transport network. In other words, we all know that …
Continue reading »What is the material architecture is made of? Is it concret, glass and steel? Mortar, bricks and timber Stone, fabrics and plastic? All of them or none of them? So many different ways of putting this, but there must be something just beyond the physica…
Continue reading »Shibuya in Tokyo is second only to Akihabara as one of our of favourite places to truly observe the urban phenomena. The movie was captured by darwinfish105 soon after the recent earthquake with a note from the autho…
Continue reading »Traditionally Geographic Information System (GIS) have been exclusively run on the Windows platform. Only very few applications run on either cross platform or exclusively on the Mac. This is part two of a review and introduction to Cartographica, a Ma…
Continue reading »We love ‘Wear you Live’ by City Fabric – in short its a series of products from T-Shirts to Tote Bags, Prints, Cushions printed with a figureground map. This type of map is commonly used in the fields of city planning, design and architecture to s…
Continue reading »This question was rarely asked in the 20th century where the focus was on optimum city size. Now cities seemingly can grow forever but as Dobbs and Remes of McKinsey say, as they grow, cities become more ‘complex’. Managing this complexity … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Its taken a while but sometimes the wait is worth it. The latest blog out of CASA is written by its founder – Professor Mike Batty. Entitled ‘A Science of Cities’ it is a site to bookmark as it is written by one of the leaders of the field. As Mik…
Continue reading »One year in the making with the goal of illustrating the duality between city and nature the timelapse below by Dominic Boudreault is one of the best we have seen. Locations include Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, New Yor…
Continue reading »TweetIterative Proportional Fitting? That old chestnut? Haven’t people been banging on about that for hundreds of years?! Well, about 70, but I guess some of the old ones are the best ones… (Deming and Stephan for all those pub quiz … Continue reading →
Continue reading »TweetI was in the Loire region of France last week for a holiday. Unusually for me, a “proper” holiday – no international orienteering racing or mountaineering. Instead, a chance to be a real tourist, visit les châteaux and try a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Architecture theory and practice has changed dramatically with the use of computers. A lot has changed or has been adapted, but for many a radical new orientation lies still ahead. There are some fundamental shifts in the way a process oriented thinkin…
Continue reading »Tweet I was in Prague at the end of last month for the final OBIS Project meeting. OBIS was a multi-year European Commission project to study and document bike sharing systems in 10 countries in the European Union. The project’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading » Handling large datasets in ArcGIS can be a truly painful process. When you are up against a deadline, the seconds spent wasted waiting for ArcGIS to update its display or run a query can be excruciating.
That is until you discover spatial indic…
At the very broadest scope, Space Syntax can be said to investigate the relationship between movement and the configuration and connectivity of space. In the past, while much favour has been found in the approach, critics have been distrustful …
Continue reading »Perhaps it’s careless wording by the Wall Street Journal, but Eric Van der Kleij appears to be claiming that: The number of start ups in the U.K.’s Tech City has more than doubled since the government-led initiative was launched last …
Continue reading »Big Data Tool Kit, located a couple of desks away from Digital Urban in CASA at University College London, has just made live his visualisation of the #1yeartogo London 2012 tag. Powered by a mix of our MapTube visualisations and behind the scenes…
Continue reading »It is now only One Year to Go! for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Summer Games 2012 here in London. The big event is moving closer by the day. Officials are eagerly pointing out that the planning and the preparation work is on schedule, very well …
Continue reading »London 2012 is only 1 year away! This is an exciting time for London and the UK in general. The new stadiums are nearly complete and most of the tickets for the events have already been sold. Hopefully if you applied for a ticket you got one! Behind the scenes here at BigDataToolKit and at […]
Continue reading »The Virtual Library of Birmingham, built by Daden Limited, has opened its doors to the public allowing access two years before the real life building is ready for occupancy. The virtual model allows visitors to explore and learn more about the public s…
Continue reading »PocketGuide is an iPhone/Android and Ovi app that provides a professionally voiced audio tour of the city based on your GPS location. The innovative part comes in as while taking the tour the app is tracking your route and allows the ability …
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 →
I know why I keep expecting Microsoft to produce something useful: they periodically manage to pull themselves together and release an Operating System that is a measurable improvement over its predecessors (e.g. the Windows 98 to XP to 7 trajectory). … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Architecture is not only about building a new house. There is a wider context to creating spaces for people. Very often this is overlooked already in the planning and in the process. The social and cultural impact for both neighbours and users as well …
Continue reading »I’ve previously talked about looking at Boris Bike data in a very first hand way, with few conceptual filters; and from that gone on to talk about some basic spatial processing, in the form of aggregating route numbers. Let’s now … Continue reading →
Crowdsourcing (Howe, 2008) is the term of used for methods of data creation, where large groups of users who are not organised centrally generate content that is shared. From direct public involvement via citizen science initiatives, such as the well d…
Continue reading »Tweet At State of the Map EU I presented a preview of GEMMA, my current UCL CASA funded project, focusing particularly on the OpenStreetMap Feature Highlighter, that will be one of our key data sources – it being an OpenStreetMap … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This week I’ll be at the InterFace conference, a meeting run by digital humanities in UCL which explores the meeting points between the humanities and computer science. I’ll be running a workshop on visualisation, so if you’re coming to that, … Continue reading →
Transformations towards opening the waterside of cities particularly in Europe are taking place for the last fifteen years. Rivers and lake side areas are being discovered as recreation areas of high value. What was formerly waste land or industrial ar…
Continue reading »Looks like the MIT City Form Research Group have developed a very useful toolkit for those interested in small-scale urban network analysis. Bit uncertain about how well it might run on larger urban networks, if I get around to testing it I’ll put th…
Continue reading »A science of cities is rooted in networks that deliver energy and information to the components that make up a functioning urban system. This one page guide takes you to the key sites, people, books, papers, data and software associated … Continue reading →
TweetOne thing I noticed in Vienna, and passing through Brussels airport on the way home, was a number of “augmented reality” advertising displays, ones that detect people in front of them and then show that on their screens. In all … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Barcelona is in terms of twitter activity one of the cities that has a strong central core of high activity. Very similar to for example the London NCL or the Paris NCL maps. The highest point is just over the Placa de Catalonia with a steep slope down…
Continue reading »Following on from my previous post – another reason I was particularly pleased to be in Vienna for State of the Map EU, was that Vienna has a bike share system! CityBikes has been around since 2003, it is run … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Increasingly architecture is produced globally. Large offices are delivering projects for clients more than half way across the world making it a very international profession. It is however mainly a oneway relationship with western practices operating…
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