Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Michael Batty

A new book on complexity and cities edited by Juval Portugali, Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk and Ekim Tan with the intriguing title that what we do has come of age. Well maybe, maybe not, I leave you to be the judge of that. But it does represent a sea change. Some it is online if you can get it. I blogged the detail on Simulacra.

Posted in Cellular Automata, Complex Systems, Design, Emergence, Evolution, Morphology, Urban Dynamics | Leave a comment

Spatial Interaction

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Michael Batty

Nothing like a lecture course to force you to publish digital copies of what one has written. Retrieved a 2 page article, more an entry, on spatial interaction from the Encyclopaedia of Geographic Information Science edited by Karen Kemp, Sage, 2007, 417-419. Largely for our Master’s students but relevant to LUTI models. See Models Blog.

Posted in Flows, Fluxes, Location, SpatialInteraction, Urban (LUTI) Models | Leave a comment

Simulating Infectious Diseases in Large Cities

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Michael Batty

We published quite a high profile paper this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Anders Johansson, myself and colleagues wrote a speculative paper on how to generalise the dynamics of SIR (spatial epidemics) models from pedestrian crowding models as part of their new series on Mass Gatherings. Here is the article.

Posted in Agent-Based Models, Biology, Flows, Fluxes, Simulation, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Simulating Employment Location

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Michael Batty

As part of our ARCADIA project, we are taking employment forecasts for different sectors from Cambridge Econometrics input-output model, and then simulating location using two-stage regression. This in turn provides the inputs to our LUTI models. There is detail of the project on our SIMULACRA blog but the working paper can be accessed here.

Posted in Location, Simulation, SpatialInteraction, Urban (LUTI) Models | Leave a comment

The City Size Debate Goes on Forever

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Michael Batty

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 Cities. Essential reading for those  involved in scaling. Readers please note that Brian graduated from UCL in 1955.

Posted in Allometry, Complex Systems, Entropy, Scaling | Leave a comment