From Geographic Information Science to Urban Science
After a bit of a hiatus from posting here about my ongoing work on the future of urban science, which is being supported by the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, I’m going to pickup the pace over the next few weeks and share a few things from a major report that is coming together which attempts to lay out the global landscape of new research organizations working in this space.
We call this project “Cities of Data”, and it focuses on the boom in new academic groups that have popped up in the last five years to pursue research and education in what is variously called urban informatics or urban science. While its founding in 1996 places the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London somewhat outside this threshold of “recently established”, it us a logical starting point for our exploration of the new urban science for multiple reasons.
First, CASA’s founder and long-time director Michael Batty is unique among leaders in the organizations in our study in that his career spans all the way from the first wave of interest in urban science and computer-based analysis of cities in the 1960s to today’s excitement around big data and cities. Here’s a brief lecture from TEDxLondon a few years ago that gives you a sense of the kind of spatial analytical work Batty and his colleagues do.
Second, Batty is the author of The New Science of Cities (MIT Press, 2014) which has become a standard textbook in urban modeling and simulation.
Finally, over its nearly 20 years in existence, CASA has developed a strong series of partnerships with the Greater London Authority, most notably Transport for London, one of the GLA’s three main units. It also works closely with the Future Cities Catapult, a nationally funded research organization to develop urban simulations for licensing and export. CASA’s success with these partnerships suggests some of the positive benefits that other urban science institutions may deliver over time.
But what’s perhaps most important about CASA is that it links the new urban science to the old.
That’s because rather than arising from the arrival of new disciplines and talent to urban research, CASA grew out the geographic information science research community which had developed in the wake of the lackluster 1960s computer-based urban modeling efforts. Initially, CASA’s focus was on the application of computation to geospatial analysis. As its website explained in 1998, the group’s goal was “to develop emerging computer technologies in several disciplines which deal with geography, space, location and the built environment. The kinds of computation involved cover geographic information systems (GIS), computer-aided architectural design, spatial analysis and simulation and methodologies of planning and decision support.”[link to archive.org copy] As Batty explains in a report on the emergin field of urban informatics to the EU, CASA was “[e]stablished as a GIS centre with strong urban focus”. But CASA has evolved and is “now orientated towards simulation, spatial data and visualization”, a considerably broader approach. The group’s current website casts an even broader ambition, stating “CASA’s focus is to be at the forefront of what is one of the grand challenges of 21st Century science: to build a science of cities from a multidisciplinary base… Our vision is to be central to this new science…”[link to current website]
The most compelling evidence of CASA’s shift in this direction is the launch in 2014 of a Master of Science in Smart Cities degree program. In some ways CASA could be seen as having ceded a market opportunity for the kinds of large-scale education programs in urban informatics seen at places like NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (which is now expanding to London through a partnership with Warwick University and King’s College), but in many ways it is the grandfather of them all — demonstrating that computationally demanding urban research can be combined with education and strong partnerships with government to create capacity for the creation of actionable knowledge that benefits its host city.
