13th October 2009 midnight Imperial College
The Dynamics of Large Cities: Population, Population Densities and Tall Buildings
Prof Michael Batty
University College London
- Web page
- https://www8.imperial.ac.uk/content/dav/ad/workspaces/complexityscience/Abstract_Batty.pdf
- Submitter
- Hans Fangohr
In this talk, I will explore what we know about systems of large cities with respect to how they compete relative to one another, establishing a hierarchy of sizes that is mysteriously regular at the macro level but highly volatile at the micro. The apparent regularity of city sizes appears to scale with size although when we examine populations, this scaling is more extreme than when we examine tall buildings within cities. Moreover for systems of cities, populations move up and down the hierarchy over decades while for tall buildings (which date from the invention of skyscrapers in the late 19th century), their dynamics is simpler with ever large buildings being constructed and hardly any being demolished. To an extent, this scaling re?ects competition which is turn is generated through economies of scale. This talk will focus on learning more about eh dynamics through visualisation prior to any explanation of why cities get larger or smaller, for despite the many possible models of how cities grow, we need to learn more about their dynamics before we are able to construct plausible and e?ective models [1,2].
-
M. Batty, The size, scale, and shape of cities, Science 319, 769 (2008).
-
M. Batty, R. Carvalho, A. Hudson-Smith, R. Milton, D. Smith, and P. Steadman, Scaling and al lometry in the building geometries of Greater London, Eur. Phys. J. B 63, 303 (2008).