Plotting Every Crash on Every Road 1999-2010
Jason Dykes showed this at the GeoVisualisation Meeting in Oxford on August 30th: A map of road crashes in Great Britain (not the UK) from 1999 to 2010. It mirrors of course the road network and the density of population but it is a remarkable graphic. < more >
Plotting and iGraph on Lion and Mountain Lion
After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with Python and iGraph since I really need to produce multiple iterations of a graph. The matmos at CASA have, of course, been touting Python for ages, but I've just not had the time/incentive to install and, more importantly, actually get around to using it... until now. Of course, like all such migrations, there has been a bit of a learning curve, so I'm documenting this to save you (and me) the trouble later because it turns out that Lion and Mountain Lion aren't 100% iGraph friendly out of the box. < more >
Europe- a millennia in ten minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYKrNptzXw < more >Pulse of the City (reboot)
As I get to better grips with the full richness of the Oyster data set and the complexity of the TfL network it's gradually getting easier to build better visualisations. One of the ones that I've wanted to revisit for quite some time was my original 'pulse of the city' animation (you can see it here). < more >
A Week in the Life of London's Public Transit System
I've been meaning to post this for ages but have had a great deal on my plate (more posts and visualisations to follow in the next week I hope) so this has kept slipping, together with the six or seven other 'draft' posts I've got going. < more >
Big Data, Complexity, Networks at the German Physical Society
Understanding and Managing Complex Systems, 5 March 2012
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) are organising this seminar on 5th March 2012 starting at 9-30am at Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29, the Netherlands. < more >
Complexity Theory in Cities
Here is a new book on complexity and cities entitled "Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age: An Overview with Implications to Urban Planning and Design" edited by Juval Portugali, Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk and Ekim Tan with the intriguing title that what we do has come of age. Well maybe, maybe not, I leave you to be the judge of that. But it does represent a sea change. The book has a wide cast of authors and the focus is on implications for urban planning and design. My own contribution written with Stephen Marshall reviews the origins of the field, returning to Geddes, Jacobs and Alexander, and is entitled: The Origins of Complexity Theory in Cities and Planning . Amongst those contributing are Hermann Halken, Peter Allen, Nikos Salingaros, Bill Hillier, Jeff Johnson, Hans Meyer, Egbert Stolk, Ekim Tan, Denise Pumain, Harry Timmermans, Stephen Read, Ward Rauws, Carl Gershensen, Dirk Sijmons, Theodore Zamenopolous, Katerina Alexiou, Michael Bitterman, Sevil Sarijildiz, Ozer Ciftcioglu, and of course Juval Portugali. Hope I haven t left anyone out. < more >
Martin Dodge, ex-CASA, wins AAG Meridian Prize for his Book Code/Space
Martin was an RA in CASA and then lecturer from 1996 to 2004. He is now Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Manchester. He coauthored the book with another friend of CASA, ROb Kitchin of NUI. Here is the citation < more >
Satellite Meeting at ECCS 2012: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics
Satellite Meeting: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics (COSMIC)
< more >London (Re)generation AD: Architectural Design
The Bartlett s Michael Batty, Matthew Carmona, Edward Denison, Murray Fraser, Matthew Gandy, and Hilary Powell all feature in current issue of Architectural Design, a lively, thought-provoking exploration of the contemporary regeneration of London, edited by David Littlefield. < more >
Simulating the Spread of Infectious Diseases in Large Cities
Anders Johansson, Mike Batty and colleagues' paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases is published online today. There they are exploring how models for simulating crowds can be extended to deal with the spread of infectious diseases in high density environments. < more >
The ARCADIA Employment Model
Duncan Smith, Camilo-Vargas Ruiz and myself (Mike Batty) have completed the employment model for the Arcadia Integrated Assessment Model. The model is unique in that it is built at the regional level for three UK regions London, the South East and East at the level of wards some 3202 in all, which dovetails it with Cambridge Econometrics Input Output Model MDME3 and thus provides employment in size sectors at the fine scale for the Land Use Transportation Interaction (LUTI) Model which covers the GLA and Outer Metropolitan Area. These nested regions with the GLA shown in Black are illustrated below. < more >
Representing Social Flows
The flow analogy is central to our work in COSMIC, Mechanicity and related projects which argue that cities should be considered as first and foremost as flow systems, not as locational patterns. This is massive break with the past as it presumes that we cannot understand locations without knowing about flows. It blows up the problem dimensionally and it means that for every non trivial locational pattern, there are a countable infinity of flow patterns that can give rise to it. This is intrinsic to the derivation of spatial interaction models using entropy maximizing which is another feature of work in CASA and although this conundrum of interaction and location has been known for many years, only now is it being exploited. Social flows of course are the hardest to observe but social media may hold some clue. Here is a map of the tracing of single short text messages from Twitter taken from the London riots and plotted in Gephi, I guess, < more >
One Days Worth of Traffic in Milton Keynes
Nice movie of traffic moving and link volumes in Milton Keynes by Joan Serras working on our SCALE project. Notice the peak and the fact that as is quite usual for such traffic, the morning peak is more accentuated than the evening peak. Joan is working to add capacity to our ARCADIA model and itheexploring how to do this with Milton Keynes data. He also has MATSim working for MK adding to our portfolio of models having worked previously on a TRANSIMS application to the town. < more >
Scaling in Social Systems
A one day EPSRC-funded workshop (at which yours truly presented) in Oxford at the Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks group (CABDyN) at the Said Business School (1st December 2011) had five interesting speakers all talking about the new social physics of cities and economies, focusing on regularities and irregularities in the structure and dynamics of these systems. Didier Sornette from ETH Zurich threw down the challenge telling us that scaling was boring and that all the action should be on departures from scaling in the case of Zipf laws, departures from such regularity where the biggest cities, incomes, firm sizes and so on are substantially less or more than what Zipf s Law might predict. < more >
Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems
Provides a complete reference guide for understanding how to apply ABM to geographical systems Presents the latest ideas and applications using ABM Addresses the issue of applying ABM in a spatial context. This unique book brings together a comprehensive set of papers on the background, theory, technical issues and applications of agent-based modelling (ABM) within geographical systems. This collection of papers is an invaluable reference point for the experienced agent-based modeller as well those new to the area. Specific geographical issues such as handling scale and space are dealt with as well as practical advice from leading experts about designing and creating ABMs, handling complexity, visualising and validating model outputs. With contributions from many of the world s leading research institutions, the latest applied research (micro and macro applications) from around the globe exemplify what can be achieved in geographical context. < more >
Changing Rank-Size Distributions over 24 Hrs on London Tube and Rail
Inspired by Jon Reades great visualizations of flows using the TfL Oyster card data, we are now starting to examine the statistical properties of the data, beginning with an analysis of what goes on in the nodes. The data yields 666 hubs or nodes which have entry and exit volumes in graph theoretic terms the in-degrees of the sources/origins and the out-degrees of the sinks/destinations. We have this data for 20 minute time segments of the entire day, giving us 72 temporal slots defining the diurnal sequence. < more >
Pulse of the City
I've been working with the TfL data over the past few weeks to better understand the geographical distribution of journeys and how this affects the load on individual segments across the transport network. In other words, we all know that some parts of some trips are particularly unbearable, and that disruptions in those areas (e.g. cancellations, delays) can seem to bring the entire system to a halt in a matter of 15 minutes. < more >
Tech City 'More than Doubled in Size'
Perhaps it's careless wording by the Wall Street Journal, but Eric Van der Kleij appears to be claiming that: < more >
A Society of Simulations
An Essay by Koert van Mensvoort, from his blog http://www.nextnature.net/ where he has a lot of interesting material on Simulacra and much else besides. He begins this essay with the following quote: < more >
Social Networks & Access to Opportunity
In my work on social networks, one thing that has been of particular interest to me is the way that social network structure seems to be correlated with access to opportunity — both for individuals, and (though I think this is less researched) for businesses. I'm not sure that we could go so far as to attribute causation to this link, but it's pretty obvious that 'who you know' matters. < more >
Exploring the Historical Determinants of Urban Growth Patterns through Cellular Automata
Kiril Stanilov has adapted RIKS METRONAMICA, an established cellular automata (CA) modelling system, to simulate the historical growth of a section of a large world city. The focus is on simulating change from the late 19th century until the modern day for a slice of London from west of Paddington to the M25 orbital road. < more >
London's Rail System as a Network
As many of you know, for quite some time I've been wrestling with a massive data set from TfL — I make it that I have 120 million trip segments across 88 million identifiable journeys in the course of just 2 weeks. Those are astronomical numbers, and it's rather worth thinking about the fact that any of this runs smoothly on a day-to-day basis the next time there's a problem with your Bus or Tube journey... The Bus system accounts for more than half of this total, but even after removing them from the analysis we're left with some 40 million journeys (an average of 3 million journeys each day) across Tube, Overground, and National Rail. < more >
Specialisation & Internationalisation
Historically, the downtown of major cities is where the most highly-skilled and highly-remunerated work was done — think: Wall Street, the City, etc. But as space has run out in the core, secondary centres such as Canary Wharf and La D fense have sprung up to meet the needs of increasingly globalised firms operating in everything from financial services to consultancy. And while these seemingly subsidiary centres are often built on reclaimed or rebuilt land that was considered undesirable (except, typically, by the people who were already living there), they are still very much a part of the world cities' and the relocations are relatively modest in terms of geographical and transportational distances. < more >
Configuring Multiple MySQL Servers on a Single Machine
A bit of a dry post here, but I thought I'd share my experience of trying to get two instances of MySQL (and two different versions, to boot) running simultaneously on a single piece of hardware as I've spent the past two days tearing my hear out and swearing profusely (mostly) under my breath.
< more >Early Views of Public Transit Usage in London
In fits and starts, over the past month I've been getting to grips with an exciting new Oyster Card data set from TfL and the wonderfully supportive Andrew Gaitskell, their resident Oyster Card data expert. For those few of you who live under a rock or have been unable to visit London: the Oyster Card is a contact-less electronic ticketing system for entering and exiting the Tube, Docklands Light Railway, Overground, and Rail (I'll leave the Bus for another post since that turns out to be a much more difficult proposition analytically). Every time a user 'taps in' or 'taps out' of a given mode of transit this leaves a trace in TfL's usage database, so this is a very different type of data set from the scheduled activities visualised by my colleague Joan Serras here. < more >
24h London Twitter Traffic
Following on from yesterday's blog post on public transport in the UK, here comes an animation of the Twitter traffic in London during 24 hours. < more >
Charting UK Energy Flows
The combined economic and environmental pressures of, on the one hand, volatile energy markets and looming peak oil, and on the other, the need to mitigate anthropogenic climate change, means that in the coming decades the economic success and quality of life of countries will be increasingly be linked to the efficiency of energy systems and moving away from fossil fuels. < more >
Visualising Public Transport Networks
With the increasingly widespread availability of transport data, we can now visualise and explore new dynamic geographies of urban transport flows and networks. In this post, I show detailed animations of UK multi-modal public transport networks using timetable data. This data will form the basis of the public transport modelling in the Simulacra projects, and be used for analyses of accessibility, network structure and resilience. < more >
Defining the Region Seminar
On the 9th September CASA hosted a seminar discussing relationships between London and the South East region with a view to developing the most appropriate framework for land use transport modelling. < more >