More City Science

SantaFe

My talk is here to download as a PDF and at some point the Santa Fe Web Site (which you can get below will have the video. I will post the video too on our CASA web site. My talk at the Santa Fe Institute is about our long standing interest in CASA in how we can build a science for our field. There is an awful lot of interest in this at present and I recently noted that two centres at MIT, besides the Sensable Cities Lab, one called City Science, the other The Centre for Advanced Urbanism profess much the same ideas as we do here. These are being paralled by a number of new centres in smart cities such as CUSP, the Centre for Urban Science and Progress, being pioneered at New York University. At Santa Fe, one of their main programs is in Cities where there are fascinating developments in scaling and in exploring urban data with a view to constructing a new understanding of how cities grow, how they merge and how the differentiate themselves through informal housing developments that transform themselves into mature cities. My talk here is wide ranging and it sets a context. The power point will be online here after I have given it.

 

Posted in allometry, Complexity, Economies of scale, Emergence, Geodesign, Information, Scaling | Leave a comment

MIT’s Media Lab as City Science

cityscience

Suddenly the world seems to have woken up to the fact that we can treat cities as a science. More than 100 years ago, Patrick Geddes said “Thus, in fact, appear the methods of a Science of Cities …..”  in Cities in Evolution, and 50 years ago, we began to treat cities as systems. But it has taken another 50 for us to realise that computers are now being embedded into everyday life in a way that makes this science feasible: real time streaming of data, and the web are opening up cities to new ways of exploring how they function and how we can make them function better. MIT has many centres dealing with cities such as Senseable, the Center for Advanced Urbanism, and so on but here from the Media Lab comes another. Click to see.  I read also that Imperial College London is generating a focus on a science of cities across its domain and we in UCL have several initiatives  including our own centre CASA as well as my own interests reported in this blog and in www.complexity.info in fashioning such a science. This  of course is the age of cities.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Complexity, Emergence, Fractals, Hierarchy, Networks, Scaling, Smart Cities | Leave a comment

Fast and Slow Urban Dynamics

EPA

The first paper published on our Simulacra model from the Tyndall Cities project, modified to deal with energy change through transport costs in Greater London. Click here to access the paper in the current issue of Environment and Planning A and here for a copy from the blog. We also used this model to examine the impact of Cross Rail in relation to the Olympic Games and this article is printed in an edition of Architectural Design on Regeneration last year (2012). Here is that one too.

 

Posted in Entropy, Flows, Interactions, LUTI models, Planning Support, Uncategorized | Leave a comment