18th Annual Malcolm Comeaux Lecture Featuring Michael Batty

Michael Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London where he is Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualization since the 1970s and has published several books, such as Cities and Complexity (MIT Press, 2005) and The New Science of Cities (MIT Press, 2013). His most recent book Inventing Future Cities was published by MIT Press in late 2018. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society, was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2004 and is the 2013 recipient of the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud. In 2015, he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his work on the science of cities. In 2016, he received the Senior Scholar Award of the Complex Systems Society and the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute. In 2018, he was awarded the Waldo Tobler prize for GIScience of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

About the talk: "Using Simulation to Explore and Invent the Future City"
The analysis of spatial relationships between the location of different activities and land uses in cities is key to our understanding of how cities function. We live in an era when cities are no longer regarded as places where congestion, pollution and poor quality of life are their main characteristics but where cities are lauded for the environments they provide for diversity and innovation which are the engines of prosperity in the modern economy.

In this talk, Dr. Batty will sketch what we have learned about the city during the last 150 years introducing the notion that cities are complex systems that are continually evolving, always in disequilibrium, and getting ever more complex as societies get wealthier and we move headlong into the information age. Despite the fact that we have many different kinds of analysis and model which aspire to understand different elements of the city, cities are evolving faster than we are able to develop new theory in their explanation prior to any thinking about their future. We will thus sketch the key models involved and the dilemmas that they pose for our better understanding of urban phenomena.