Category Archives: Biology

Simulating Infectious Diseases in Large Cities

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Michael Batty

TweetWe 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 … Continue reading →

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

Cities as Organisms

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Michael Batty

Tweet You go to conferences and learn about older papers that you should have known about. This short article from 1999 by Thomas Graedel poses the key issues about energy, ecosystems and cities, part of a series from the National … Continue reading →

Posted in Biology, energy, Evolution | Leave a comment

The Heartbeat of the City

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Michael Batty

Tweet 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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Biology, Flows, Fluxes, Networks, Transport | Leave a comment

On Complexity

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Michael Batty

Tweet Nobel Prize Winner Herbert Simon said, in one of his last contributions: “The theory of complex systems is perhaps going to look more like biology, with its myriad of species and of proteins, than physics, with its overreaching generalizations.” … Continue reading →

Posted in Biology, Complex Systems | Leave a comment