Category Archives: Morphology

Complexity in Regional Science: The Alonso Lecture

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Michael Batty

Here is my lecture given at the North American Regional Science Association Annual Conference in Miami, 11th Nov 2011. It is as good a summary as I can muster of complexity theory applied to cities & regions. I focus on … Continue reading →

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

Network Science, A Guide

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Michael Batty

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 →

Posted in Morphology, Networks, Transport | Leave a comment

The Heart of the City

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Michael Batty

Written by Victor Gruen in 1964 who said “I can visualize a metropolitan organism in which cells, each one consisting of a nucleus and a protoplasm, are combined into clusterizations to form specialised organs like towns…..” He portrayed this idealised … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution, Morphology, Transport | Leave a comment

Procedures to Generate Fractal Cityscapes

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Michael Batty

For a decade or more, computer scientists have used procedural logics (grammars) to generate urban morphologies. The paper by Li and Miller uses such recursive procedures similar to those we used a while ago to generate fractal cityscapes. Watch their … Continue reading →

Posted in Fractal Geometry, Morphology | Leave a comment

Cities as Biologies

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Michael Batty

The analogy between the city and the human body goes back to Leonardo. The heart of the city, said Victor Gruen, pumps its people as flows of traffic to keep it energized as an exchange mechanism. Great visualization of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Flows, Fluxes, Morphology | Leave a comment