The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
These attractive hand-drawn maps have been produced for a pocket guide “London’s Canals & Rivers” published by the Canal & River Trust by illustrator and cartographer Bek Cruddace. They show the navigable waterways around London, including the Thames and Lea Rivers and the Regent’s and Grand Union canals. The maps are designed for walkers and […]
Continue reading »Followers of English football will be aware that the top tier is the Premier League and that the clubs that finish in the top four at the end of the season play in the European Champions’ League in the following … Continue reading →
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The man who voiced the “Mind the Gap” announcement has died
CityMetric Finally, our map of the week – which, I’ll be honest, we do no justice to whatsoever – is this magnificent piece of work by Duncan Smith of UCL’s Centre for Advanced spatial Analysis. It shows, at a glance, the growth of all the world’s major cities … |
Now that the press release by the European Research Council (ERC) is out, it’s time to share the great news: The Extreme Citizen Science group has secured €2.5m from the ERC to continue our journey towards Intelligent Maps. Building on the work that we’ve done with the support of the EPSRC in Extreme Citizen Science, and the … Continue reading ERC Advanced Grant: Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and Visualisation
The reason why teaching undergrads is the best job I’ve ever done is because interacting with intelligent, energetic people is not the once-in-a-while happy coincidence it is in most jobs, but it’s the central purpose of what you’re supposed to be doing. Sure, there are the hours of marking, the jocks, the whingers (colleagues that … Continue reading “Economists should start doing themselves out of a job”
I argued in an earlier piece that game-changing advances in urban analytics may well depend on technological change. One such possibility is the introduction of block chain software. a block is a set of accounts at a node. This is … Continue reading →
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The tube map is almost certainly London’s most widely produced and collected map, with many millions of the pocket version being issued for free every year by TfL from London’s 270+ tube stations. But how about having one that’s made of steel? Well, now you can thanks to Suck UK, who have produced an officially […]
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The tube map is almost certainly London’s most widely produced and collected map, with many millions of the pocket version being issued for free every year by TfL from London’s 270+ tube stations. But how about having one that’s made of steel? Well, now you can thanks to Suck UK, who have produced an officially […]
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Quiz: Can you name the city from one photograph?
CityMetric Finally, our map of the week – which, I’ll be honest, we do no justice to whatsoever – is this magnificent piece of work by Duncan Smith of UCL’s Centre for Advanced spatial Analysis. It shows, at a glance, the growth of all the world’s major cities … |
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Why are there almost no bridges across Amsterdam’s largest river?
CityMetric If only: one of the proposed designs for a bridge across the IJ. Image: Fons Alkemade. What is Amsterdam famous for? Besides being Europe’s Sin City, and having one million bicycles, it’s also known as “Venice of the North”. The city has more than a … |
Hegel once said that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ and in our world of cities, this seems ever resonant with the problems that we face. Danny Hillis and Neri Oxman have called this the Age of Entanglement and in this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »There has been much discussion in recent years about the UK ‘productivity puzzle’: the shortfall in productivity between the UK and comparable EU states like Germany and France, with this gap widening in the last decade. One important perspective for understanding productivity relates to skills and education, and how well graduate skills are integrated with businesses and are helping … Continue reading Graduate Mobility and Closing the Productivity Gap for UK Cities →
This is one of the many data visualisation and design postcards that Stefanie Posavec and Georgia Lupi sent each other of the course of a year. It’s a personal map of Stefanie’s London history – where she lived, studied and worked, her main commute and other routes. Everyone living in London will build up a […]
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 »Last week I attended the American Association of Geographers annual conference in San Francisco. This was my first AAG and first time visiting the Bay Area, so made for a fascinating trip. The tech boom and economic resurgence of the Bay Area is a topic of much interest to geographers, and I really enjoyed the Author Meets the Critics … Continue reading AAG 2016 in San Francisco →
Following on with our GeoSocial Analysis work, we recently had a paper published in PLOS ONE entitled “Crowdsourcing A Collective Sense of Place.” In the paper we discuss and showcase how one can take a quantitative approach to derive a collectiv…
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Following on with our GeoSocial Analysis work, we recently had a paper published in PLOS ONE entitled “Crowdsourcing A Collective Sense of Place.” In the paper we discuss and showcase how one can take a quantitative approach to derive a collectiv…
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The London Panopticon utilises the traffic camera feed from the TfL API, which recently added 10-second-long video clips from the traffic cameras on TfL “red route” roads, to show the current state of traffic near you. It loads the latest videos from the nearest camera in each compass direction to you. The images are nearly-live … Continue reading London Panopticon →
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The Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI), Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and University of Canterbury are seeking to appoint an Associate Professor / Professor in Spatial Information.
Please find ap…
In some circles (e.g. mine) news that the government is trying (again) to sell off the Land Registry has caused something of a stir. The curtain closed on the first act of this drama in March 2014, by which time 91% … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The World City Populations Interactive Map is now available as a static map, and has been published as a Featured Graphic in Environment and Planning A. The EPA article includes details on the UN World Urbanization Prospects data, and the methods used to create the map. For a high resolution version of the static map, click below-
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Medellín’s smog is so bad that the mayor is cancelling sporting events
CityMetric Colombia’s second city has been forced to take drastic measures to combat the dizzying levels of pollution that the city is experiencing. Medellín (the name is pronounced “Me-de-jeen”, by the way) was once famed for being the world’s former murder capital. |
CityMetric |
Lessons from history: A century ago, the Tories accepted that only councils could solve the housing crisis
CityMetric Finally, our map of the week – which, I’ll be honest, we do no justice to whatsoever – is this magnificent piece of work by Duncan Smith of UCL’s Centre for Advanced spatial Analysis. It shows, at a glance, the growth of all the world’s major cities … |
The Shard, London’s tallest building, has a viewing platform at the top, the The View from the Shard. To access the platform, you use two lifts, the first from the 1st to the 33rd floor and then a second lift from the 33rd to 68th floor. The viewing galleries are then on the 69th floor […]
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The Shard, London’s tallest building, has a viewing platform at the top, the The View from the Shard. To access the platform, you use two lifts, the first from the 1st to the 33rd floor and then a second lift from the 33rd to 68th floor. The viewing galleries are then on the 69th floor […]
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Top Industry maps the most popular employment for each of the ~220000 statistical small areas* within the UK. I’ve reused the “top result” technique that has produced interesting maps for travel to work, to look at the Industry of Employment tables produced by the national statistics agencies, from the 2011 Census. The tables I’ve used … Continue reading Working Nation →
Continue reading »I’ve often asked myself, in self doubting moments and imposter-syndrome-rich night sweat events, what the difference is really between a person who says they are an economist and, well, just a person. Can I really lay any claim to be something other than the averagely well-informed news media-consuming citizen? Certainly a lot of what I covered in my MSc … Continue reading “How to make an economist”
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Some depressing maps on the state of London’s private rental market
CityMetric Finally, our map of the week – which, I’ll be honest, we do no justice to whatsoever – is this magnificent piece of work by Duncan Smith of UCL’s Centre for Advanced spatial Analysis. It shows, at a glance, the growth of all the world’s major cities … |
We recently received word that we had a paper accepted for the upcoming 2016 International Conference on Social Media and Society entitled “Accuracy Of User-Contributed Image Tagging In Flickr: A Natural Disaster Case Study.” In the paper w…
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We recently received word that we had a paper accepted for the upcoming 2016 International Conference on Social Media and Society entitled “Accuracy Of User-Contributed Image Tagging In Flickr: A Natural Disaster Case Study.” In the paper w…
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 →
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In the past I have written several pieces about Google, Google Maps and how its been pushing the boundaries of geography. The other day I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by John Bailey from Google’s Geo Education team when he was visiting Masons …
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In the past I have written several pieces about Google, Google Maps and how its been pushing the boundaries of geography. The other day I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by John Bailey from Google’s Geo Education team when he was visiting Masons …
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 →
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Twitter grew out of founder Jack Dorsey’s obsession with cities
CityMetric Twitter turned ten this week, and, naturally, much has been made of the birth of the social network. But in amid the talk of silly rejected names and the first tweet ever sent, few have mentioned a little-known fact: Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and … |
Special Issue on Smart Buildings and Cities for IEEE Pervasive Computing
Submission deadline: 1 July 2016 Extended to July 18th, 2016
Publication date: April–June 2017
One of Mark Weiser’s first envisionments of ubiquitous and pervasive computing had the smart home as its central core. Since then, researchers focused on realizing this vision have built out from the smart home to the smart city. Such environments aim to improve the transparency of information and the quality of life through access to smarter and more appropriate services.
Despite efforts to build these environments, there are still many unanswered questions: What does it mean to make a building or a city “smart”? What infrastructure is necessary to support smart environments? What is the return on investment of a smart environment?
The key to building smart environments is the fusion of multiple technologies including sensing, advanced networks, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data analytics, and mobile devices. This special issue aims to explore new technologies, methodologies, case studies, and applications related to smart buildings and cities. Contributions may come from diverse fields such as distributed systems, HCI, ambient intelligence, architecture, transportation and urban planning, policy development, and cyber-physical systems. Relevant topics for issue include
The guest editors invite original and high-quality submissions addressing all aspects of this field, as long as the connection to the focus topic is clear and emphasized.
Guest Editors
Submission Information
Special Issue on Smart Buildings and Cities for IEEE Pervasive Computing
Submission deadline: 1 July 2016 Extended to July 18th, 2016
Publication date: April–June 2017
One of Mark Weiser’s first envisionments of ubiquitous and pervasive computing had the smart home as its central core. Since then, researchers focused on realizing this vision have built out from the smart home to the smart city. Such environments aim to improve the transparency of information and the quality of life through access to smarter and more appropriate services.
Despite efforts to build these environments, there are still many unanswered questions: What does it mean to make a building or a city “smart”? What infrastructure is necessary to support smart environments? What is the return on investment of a smart environment?
The key to building smart environments is the fusion of multiple technologies including sensing, advanced networks, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data analytics, and mobile devices. This special issue aims to explore new technologies, methodologies, case studies, and applications related to smart buildings and cities. Contributions may come from diverse fields such as distributed systems, HCI, ambient intelligence, architecture, transportation and urban planning, policy development, and cyber-physical systems. Relevant topics for issue include
The guest editors invite original and high-quality submissions addressing all aspects of this field, as long as the connection to the focus topic is clear and emphasized.
Guest Editors
Submission Information