Big Data+City Planning

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Michael Batty

bigdataDHG

A special issue of the new journal Dialogues in Human Geography has just come out devoted to Geography and Big Data. There are several commentaries on the position paper by Mark Graham and Taylor Shelton entitled ‘Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography’ with several critiques of current developments by Rob Kitchin, Evelyn Ruppert, myself, Mike Goodchild, Sean Gorman, Sandra González-Bailón and Trevor Barnes. My own contribution that you can get here deals with how big data is changing our conception of cities and indeed perhaps of city planning with the implication that time scales for planning are shortening and of course that town planning is in many senses no longer fit for purpose as the world around us becomes ever more digital and as the digital and the material mix.

Drill down for my article. Sage told us in no uncertain terms that although I could share my article with my friends (who read this blog) I could not share all the other articles in this way even though they are all of one piece, so to speak. So I can’t put all the articles online. So much for recent missives of the Research Councils and my own university that anything produced by any kind of funding from the UK public purse devoted to research, must be accessible.

Posted in Big Data, Complexity, Planning Support, Smart Cities | Leave a comment

Two visions of smart cities

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Michael Batty

NSReview

A Review of Smart Cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia by Anthony M. Townsend and my own book The New Science of Cities by Michael Batty, by Tim Smedley in New Scientist Magazine issue 2946, December 9th 2013. Tim Smedlay has done us both proud with a review of both our books that is positive and forward looking, in my view following the various themes that we develop in our respective books. I noted Anthony Townsend’s book in a previous blog post when it was published a couple of months ago and my own book is detailed on my other blog www.complexcity.info to which the reader is referred.

I particularly warm to Tim’s summary of my point of view when he says ‘Overall, The New Science of Cities is an ambitious and laudable undertaking, one that Batty admits cannot be comprehensive,….. Those wanting an “integrated science that is nicely packaged and available to apply immediately”, Batty writes, “will be disappointed. No such package exists, and it probably never will. Like physics, it might seem as though the field should aspire to an integrated theory… but as in physics too, this is a mirage.”’

This is the battle cry of a new science of cities that weaves seamlessy and consistently into other versions of this science of which there are many. We should applaud this rather than consider multiple viewpoints to imply inconsistency. After all cities are where people come together, where diversity thrives, and where conflict and dissent are resolved.

Posted in Big Data, city size, Complexity, Emergence, Graphs, Hierarchy, Networks, Smart Cities | Leave a comment

TEDxLondon: City 2.0

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Michael Batty

TEDXnew

Friday December 6th I presented a TEDxLondon talk in the City 2.0 series. I must admit then when they invited me to present something on cities, I thought they had mistaken me for …. well, it was a surprise, anyway, not thinking of myself as particularly telegenic or a popular lecture circuit type.  It was a pretty inspiring event I must say – ten or more speakers all doing either 18 or 6 minutes in The Crystal – a building that looks like a stealth bomber in a place that looks as though … well it is East London and it could be nice area eventually but it is still like something out of a J. G. Ballard novel. The talk may eventually get to YouTube but I can now post it as a PDF here and it complements the  short commentary I wrote three years or so ago which contains some of this material which you can get this here too. The other stuff I talked about is our fascinating way of defining cities by pruning the network of connections, developed by our Mechanicity group in CASA led by Elsa, Erez, Pete, Paolo, et al., who are thinking about this problem. We will publish something on this very soon.

There are almost as many perspectives about cities and future cities as there are people thinking about cities, and that is probably most of us. In fact I almost became a media star in the 1970s when I made a program called Mathematics for Modelling for the Open University about retail gravity models. We have posted the video of this program online and what is brilliant about it, are the hairstyles, the clothes, the props, … it is the lapels and the bell bottom trousers that are the height of fashion then never to be repeated. Anyway you can see that here too. In fact back in 1976 when this one was made, most of us were still thinking that the world’s population would explode upwards and we would run out of resources by now and descend into chaos. And we didn’t think that the whole world would be made of cities sometime in the 21st century. This was the time of the Club or Rome and one of dire predictions for western society. China was not rising and Japan was Number One. How it all changes. My talk at TEDx is about this change and what we might expect for cities over the next 50 or 100 years.

Posted in allometry, city size, Connectivity, power laws | Leave a comment