A variety of interesting papers in Utrecht for the 13th Meeting of Computers in Urban Modelling and Urban Management (July 3-5, 2013). Harry Timmermans gave an interesting keynote “What-ifs, if-whats and maybes : sketch of ubiquitous collaborative decision support technology” which is printed in the preprinted book of the conference Geertman, S.(ed.): Planning Support Systems for Sustainable Urban Development. Berlin: Springer. Resonates very strongly with my own keynote in Cambridge last week. The notion of long term spatial structure beginning to fade as an organising concept for the city as more and more activities are structured through real time short term responses using mobile devices, was key to his talk.
Math Targets Cities’ Essence
Luis Bettencourt’s paper in Science on The Origins of Scaling in Cities and my commentary on it called a Theory of City Size are summarised in a rather nice piece from Rachel Ehernberg in this week’s Science News where she links it all back to complexity theory and to Jane Jacob’s kaleidoscope of diversity in cities published in her book more than 50 years ago The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Click here or on the image to see her article.
Applied Urban Modelling 2013
Today Flora Roumpani presents her work on urban modelling using City Engine. Anders Johansson, Kiril Stanilov and Pete Ferguson all present today and tomorrow Vassilis Zachariasis presents. Big CASA presence at this meeting.This is the third meeting in this series organised by the Martin Centre in Cambridge. I presented an introductory talk on Urban Modelling yesterday which focussed on how the field evolved and how it is being stretched now by Big Data. You can get my talk by clicking here.