Author Archives: Michael Batty

About Michael Batty

I chair CASA at UCL which I set up in 1995. I am Bartlett Professor In UCL.

Simulating Employment Location

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 … Continue reading

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

The City Size Debate Goes on Forever

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 … Continue reading

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

Extreme MegaCities

James Canton in a prescient article in Significance argues that cities will diversify as they get larger. Like Dobbs & Remes in their McKinsey report, he argues there is effectively no limit on their growth. At least not in terms … Continue reading

Posted in Evolution, Scaling, Smart Cities, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Quest for the Qualitative

Notwithstanding Rutherford’s quote “Qualitative is nothing but poor quantitative”, my old article (1982, but rediscovered! on the web) may have contemporary resonance if not relevance. How to think about discontinuities in social systems in terms of catastrophe theory: riots and … Continue reading

Posted in Chaos, Emergence, Policy Analysis, Tipping Points, Urban Dynamics | Leave a comment

Visualising the Flow of Debt

Topical visualisations of flows: so simple, so effective. How we can visualise the flow of debt in the west between countries by the BBC  and even better by the New York Times which introduces scenarios about future flows, reflecting contagion, phase … Continue reading

Posted in Design, Flows, Fluxes, Networks, SpatialInteraction | Leave a comment