Category Archives: Urban Dynamics

The Network City

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Michael Batty

Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros have written a nice paper on networks which is the online journal Biourbanism. They quote from E. Forster who made much in  stories of the fact that we need to ‘connect’. His novella The Machine … Continue reading →

Posted in Flows, Fluxes, Networks, Urban Dynamics | Leave a comment

Urban Transformations and Urban Structure

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Michael Batty

Check out Luc D’Acci’s Blog. He has some very interesting projects on mega cities and the internal structure of cities which blends lots of ideas from economics and complexity theory with spatial structures and patterns. Some papers are downloadable

Posted in Complex Systems, Morphology, Social Physics, Uncategorized, Urban Dynamics | Leave a comment

Financial Footprints: Transactions in Real Time

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Michael Batty

Material and people flows in cities show atoms are bonded together but money and information flows have much greater resonance. The great challenge is not only to build good economic flow models but first to observe and measure them. Pioneering … Continue reading →

Posted in Animations, Flows, Fluxes, Networks, Urban Dynamics | Leave a comment

Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Michael Batty

A new book on complexity and cities 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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Cellular Automata, Complex Systems, Design, Emergence, Evolution, Morphology, Urban Dynamics | Leave a comment

The Quest for the Qualitative

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Michael Batty

Notwithstanding Rutherford’s quote “Qualitative is nothing but poor quantitative”, my old article (1982, but rediscovered! on the web) may have contemporary resonance if not relevance. How to think about discontinuities in social systems in terms of catastrophe theory: riots and … Continue reading →

Posted in Chaos, Emergence, Policy Analysis, Tipping Points, Urban Dynamics | Leave a comment