arXiv subjects

Michael Batty

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Batty.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

As Cities Grow, They Spread Out Rather Than Rise

Cities and settlements are a global phenomenon, and their continued expansion is fundamentally transforming patterns of resource demand. This transformation is reflected in growing pressures on land, material use, and infrastructure. Thus, understanding how cities grow in space is essential for planning future urban development and determining all its consequences. Here, we characterize four geometrically related dimensions of urban growth: two horizontal dimensions describing the urban area, one vertical dimension represented by average building height, which together with the urban area defines building volume, and the population dimension. Analyzing a global dataset of growing cities, for the period 1975-2025 we identify three main patterns. First, urban growth is fundamentally anisotropic -- as cities gain population, they expand much more rapidly in the horizontal than in the vertical direction. Second, average building height decreases in the vast majority of cities as they grow, indicating that vertical development is not only slower than horizontal expansion but on average, can act in an effectively negative manner by giving greater weight to the horizontal dimensions. Third, despite their diverse growth trajectories, cities converge toward characteristic population densities, both with respect to urban area and building volume. We further explore alternative scenarios for future urban growth. These projections show that different assumptions about horizontal and vertical scaling can lead to substantially different demands for urban land and building volume. These findings reveal constraints on the long-term evolution of urban form and provide a quantitative assessment for understanding the spatial dynamics and development of cities.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Building a Digital Twin for British Cities

Ever faster computers are enabling us to extend our standard land use transportation interaction (LUTI) models to systems of cities within which individual cities compete for resources within the wider environment in which they interact.As we scale up in this way, we are able to simulate and measure the impacts of large-scale infrastructures at different spatial levels.Here we build a platform, which is essentially a digital twin, for over 8000 urban places in Great Britain where we can rapidly model all flows between these locations using multi-modal spatial interaction models.We first present the structure of the model and then apply it to population, employment and trip flow data for three modes of travel (road, bus and rail) between small spatial units defining the three countries, England, Scotland and Wales.We then tune and train the model to reproduce a baseline, and follow this with a demonstration of the web-based interface used to run and interact with the model and its predictions.Once we have developed the platform, we are able to explore variants of the twin, partitioning the country in different ways, showing how different forms of spatial representation change the performance of the model.We are developing the model at a much finer scale making comparisons of performance while adding an active travel layer that elaborates the twin.We finally illustrate how the model can be used to measure the impacts of new scenarios for rail, simulating the Integrated Rail Plan and the High Speed 2 proposal

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Active-travel modelling: a methodological approach to networks for walking and cycling commuting analysis

Walking and cycling, commonly referred to as active travel, have become integral components of modern transport planning. Recently, there has been growing recognition of the substantial role that active travel can play in making cities more liveable, sustainable and healthy, as opposed to traditional vehicle-centred approaches. This shift in perspective has spurred interest in developing new data sets of varying resolution levels to represent, for instance, walking and cycling street networks. This has also led to the development of tailored computational tools and quantitative methods to model and analyse active travel flows. In response to this surge in active travel-related data and methods, our study develops a methodological framework primarily focused on walking and cycling as modes of commuting. We explore commonly used data sources and tools for constructing and analysing walking and cycling networks, with a particular emphasis on distance as a key factor that influences, describes, and predicts commuting behaviour. Our ultimate aim is to investigate the role of different network distances in predicting active commuting flows. To achieve this, we analyse the flows in the constructed networks by looking at the detour index of shortest paths. We then use the Greater London Area as a case study, and construct a spatial interaction model to investigate the observed commuting patterns through the different networks. Our results highlight the differences between chosen data sets, the uneven spatial distribution of their performance throughout the city and its consequent effect on the spatial interaction model and prediction of walking and cycling commuting flows.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Urban Visual Intelligence: Studying Cities with AI and Street-level Imagery

The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Inferring urban polycentricity from the variability in human mobility patterns

The polycentric city model has gained popularity in spatial planning policy, since it is believed to overcome some of the problems often present in monocentric metropolises, ranging from congestion to difficult accessibility to jobs and services. However, the concept 'polycentric city' has a fuzzy definition and as a result, the extent to which a city is polycentric cannot be easily determined. Here, we leverage the fine spatio-temporal resolution of smart travel card data to infer urban polycentricity by examining how a city departs from a well-defined monocentric model. In particular, we analyse the human movements that arise as a result of sophisticated forms of urban structure by introducing a novel probabilistic approach which captures the complexity of these human movements. We focus on London (UK) and Seoul (South Korea) as our two case studies, and we specifically find evidence that London displays a higher degree of monocentricity than Seoul, suggesting that Seoul is likely to be more polycentric than London.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2021

Urban Analytics: History, Trajectory, and Critique

Urban analytics combines spatial analysis, statistics, computer science, and urban planning to understand and shape city futures. While it promises better policymaking insights, concerns exist around its epistemological scope and impacts on privacy, ethics, and social control. This chapter reflects on the history and trajectory of urban analytics as a scholarly and professional discipline. In particular, it considers the direction in which this field is going and whether it improves our collective and individual welfare. It first introduces early theories, models, and deductive methods from which the field originated before shifting toward induction. It then explores urban network analytics that enrich traditional representations of spatial interaction and structure. Next it discusses urban applications of spatiotemporal big data and machine learning. Finally, it argues that privacy and ethical concerns are too often ignored as ubiquitous monitoring and analytics can empower social repression. It concludes with a call for a more critical urban analytics that recognizes its epistemological limits, emphasizes human dignity, and learns from and supports marginalized communities.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Estimating public transport congestion in UK urban areas with open transport models

Operational urban transport models require to gather heterogeneous sets of data and often integrate different sub-models. Their systematic validation and reproducible application therefore remains problematic. We propose in this contribution to build transport models from the bottom-up using scientific workflow systems with open-source components and data. These open models are aimed in particular at estimating congestion of public transport in all UK urban areas. This allows us building health indicators related to public transport density in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, and testing related policies.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

London in Lockdown: Mobility in the Pandemic City

This chapter looks at the spatial distribution and mobility patterns of essential and non-essential workers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in London and compares them to the rest of the UK. In the 3-month lockdown that started on 23 March 2020, 20% of the workforce was deemed to be pursuing essential jobs. The other 80%% were either furloughed, which meant being supported by the government to not work, or working from home. Based on travel journey data between zones (trips were decomposed into essential and non-essential trips. Despite some big regional differences within the UK, we find that essential workers have much the same spatial patterning as non-essential for all occupational groups containing essential and non-essential workers. Also, the amount of travel time saved by working from home during the Pandemic is roughly the same proportion -80%-as the separation between essential and non-essential workers. Further, the loss of travel, reduction in workers, reductions in retail spending as well as increases in use of parks are examined in different London boroughs using Google Mobility Reports which give us a clear picture of what has happened over the last 6 months since the first Lockdown. These reports also now imply that a second wave of infection is beginning.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Urbanization and Economic Complexity

Urbanization plays a crucial role in the economic development of every country. The mutual relationship between the urbanization of any country and its economic productive structure is far from being understood. We analyzed the historical evolution of product exports for all countries using the World Trade Web (WTW) with respect to patterns of urbanization from 1995-2010. Using the evolving framework of economic complexity, we reveal that a country's economic development in terms of its production and export of goods, is interwoven with the urbanization process during the early stages of its economic development and growth. Meanwhile in urbanized countries, the reciprocal relation between economic growth and urbanization fades away with respect to its later stages, becoming negligible for countries highly dependent on the export of resources where urbanization is not linked to any structural economic transformation.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Evidence for localization and urbanization economies in urban scaling

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of Australia and the US. The number of workers and aggregate incomes in specific high income knowledge economy related occupations and industries show increasing returns to scale by city size, showing that localization economies within particular industries account for superlinear effects. However, when total urban area incomes and/or Gross Domestic Products are regressed using a generalised Cobb-Douglas function against the number of workers in different occupations as labour inputs, constant returns to scale in productivity against city size are observed. This implies that the urbanization economies at the whole city level show linear scaling or constant returns to scale. Furthermore, industrial and occupational organisations, not population size, largely explain the observed productivity variable. The results show that some very specific industries and occupations contribute to the observed overall superlinearity. The findings suggest that it is not just size but also that it is the diversity of specific intra-city organization of economic and social activity and physical infrastructure that should be used to understand urban scaling behaviors.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Airbnb's disruption of the housing structure in London

This paper explores Airbnb, a peer-to-peer platform for short-term rental of housing accommodation, examining the geographical pattern of those establishments using data from London. Our purpose is to analyse whether or not the diversity of dwelling types correlate with the distribution of listings. We use a measure of spread based on entropy to indicate the diversity of dwelling types and look at its relationship with the distribution of Airbnb establishments, as well as the type of home ownership using correlation analysis. It is important to note that our study only considers domestic building types, and excludes any information on the diversity of land uses. Two important findings emerge from our analysis. Firstly, the spatial location of Airbnb rentals is negatively correlated with the diversity of dwelling types, and positively correlated with a single dwelling type, which corresponds in general to purpose built flats, conversions and flats in commercial buildings. Secondly, Airbnb is associated with areas that have a high proportion of privately rented properties, detracting more than 1.4% of the housing supply into short-term rentals. Such a phenomenon can reach up to 20% in some neighbourhoods, further exacerbating the process of gentrification. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings as instruments to inform policies associated with the 'sharing' economy in relation to the disruption of the housing structure.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Measuring Accessibility using Gravity and Radiation Models

Since the presentation of the Radiation Model, much work has been done to compare its findings with those obtained from Gravitational Models. These comparisons always aim at measuring the accuracy with which the models reproduce the mobility described by origin-destination matrices. This has been done at different spatial scales using different datasets, and several versions of the models have been proposed to adjust to various spatial systems. However the models, to our knowledge, have never been compared with respect to policy testing scenarios. For this reason, here we use the models to analyze the impact of the introduction of a new transportation network, a Bus Rapid Transport system, in the city of Teresina in Brazil. We do this by measuring the estimated variation in the trip distribution, and formulate an accessibility to employment indicator for the different zones of the city. By comparing the results obtained with the two approaches, we are able, not only to better assess the goodness of fit and the impact of this intervention, but also to understand reasons for the systematic similarities and differences in their predictions.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

Quantifying Retail Agglomeration using Diverse Spatial Data

Newly available data on the spatial distribution of retail activities in cities makes it possible to build models formalized at the level of the single retailer. Current models tackle consumer location choices at an aggregate level and the opportunity new data offers for modeling at the retail unit level lacks a theoretical framework. The model we present here helps to address these issues. It is a particular case of the Cross-Nested Logit model, based on random utility theory built with the idea of quantifying the role of floor space and agglomeration in retail location choice. We test this model on the city of London: the results are consistent with a super linear scaling of a retailer's attractiveness with its floor space, and with an agglomeration effect approximated as the total retail floorspace within a $325m$ radius from each shop.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

Defining urban agglomerations to detect agglomeration economies

Agglomeration economies are a persistent subject of debate among economists and urban planners. Their definition turns on whether or not larger cities and regions are more efficient and more productive than smaller ones. We complement existing discussion on agglomeration economies and the urban wage premium here by providing a sensitivity analysis of estimated coefficients to different delineations of urban agglomeration as well as to different definitions of the economic measure that summarises the urban premium. This quantity can consist of total wages measured at the place of work, or of income registered at the place of residence. The chosen option influences the scaling behaviour of city size as well as the spatial distribution of the phenomenon at the city level. Spatial discrepancies between the distribution of jobs and the distribution of households at different economic levels makes city definitions crucial to the estimation of economic relations which vary with city size. We argue this point by regressing measures of income and wage over about five thousands different definitions of cities in France, based on our algorithmic aggregation of administrative spatial units at regular cutoffs which reflect density, population thresholds and commuting flows. We also go beyond aggregated observations of wages and income by searching for evidence of larger inequalities and economic segregation in the largest cities. This paper therefore considers the spatial and economic complexity of cities with respect to discussion about how we measure agglomeration economies. It provides a basis for reflection on alternative ways to model the processes which lead to observed variations, and this can provide insights for more comprehensive regional planning.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2015

Paradoxical Interpretations of Urban Scaling Laws

Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the same territory, time and attribute, depending on the criteria used to delineate cities. The aim of this paper is to present new insights concerning this variation, coupled with a sensitivity analysis of urban scaling in France, for several socio-economic and infrastructural attributes from data collected exhaustively at the local level. The sensitivity analysis considers different aggregations of local units for which data are given by the Population Census. We produce a large variety of definitions of cities (approximatively 5000) by aggregating local Census units corresponding to the systematic combination of three definitional criteria: density, commuting flows and population cutoffs. We then measure the magnitude of scaling estimations and their sensitivity to city definitions for several urban indicators, showing for example that simple population cutoffs impact dramatically on the results obtained for a given system and attribute. Variations are interpreted with respect to the meaning of the attributes (socio-economic descriptors as well as infrastructure) and the urban definitions used (understood as the combination of the three criteria). Because of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem and of the heterogeneous morphologies and social landscapes in the cities internal space, scaling estimations are subject to large variations, distorting many of the conclusions on which generative models are based. We conclude that examining scaling variations might be an opportunity to understand better the inner composition of cities with regard to their size, i.e. to link the scales of the city-system with the system of cities.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2015

Multifractal to monofractal evolution of the London's street network

We perform a multifractal analysis of the evolution of London's street network from 1786 to 2010. First, we show that a single fractal dimension, commonly associated with the morphological description of cities, does not su ce to capture the dynamics of the system. Instead, for a proper characterization of such a dynamics, the multifractal spectrum needs to be considered. Our analysis reveals that London evolves from an inhomogeneous fractal structure, that can be described in terms of a multifractal, to a homogeneous one, that converges to monofractality. We argue that London's multifractal to monofracal evolution might be a special outcome of the constraint imposed on its growth by a green belt. Through a series of simulations, we show that multifractal objects, constructed through di usion limited aggregation, evolve towards monofractality if their growth is constrained by a non-permeable boundary.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2015

Urban transfer entropy across scales

The morphology of urban agglomeration is studied here in the context of information exchange between different spatio-temporal scales. Cities are multidimensional non-linear phenomena, so understanding the relationships and connectivity between scales is important in determining how the interplay of local/regional urban policies may affect the distribution of urban settlements. In order to quantify these relationships, we follow an information theoretic approach using the concept of Transfer Entropy. Our analysis is based on a stochastic urban fractal model, which mimics urban growing settlements and migration waves. The results indicate how different policies could affect urban morphology in terms of the information generated across geographical scales.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2015

The Fractured Nature of British Politics

The outcome of the British General Election to be held in just over one week's time is widely regarded as the most difficult in living memory to predict. Current polls suggest that the two main parties are neck and neck but that there will be a landslide to the Scottish Nationalist Party with that party taking most of the constituencies in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats are forecast to loose more than half their seats and the fringe parties of whom the UK Independence Party is the biggest are simply unknown quantities. Much of this volatility relates to long-standing and deeply rooted cultural and nationalist attitudes that relate to geographical fault lines that have been present for 500 years or more but occasionally reveal themselves, at times like this. In this paper our purpose is to raise the notion that these fault lines are critical to thinking about regionalism, nationalism and the hierarchy of cities in Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland). We use a percolation method (Arcaute et al. 2015) to reveal them that treats Britain as a giant cluster of related places each defined from the intersections of the road network at a very fine spatial scale. We break this giant cluster into a detailed hierarchy of sub-clusters by successively reducing a distance threshold which first breaks off some of the Scottish Islands and then reveals the very distinct nations and regions that make up Britain, all the way down to the definition of the largest cities that appear when the threshold reaches 300m. We use these percolation clusters to apportion the 2010 voting pattern to a new hierarchy of constituencies based on these clusters, and this gives us a picture of how Britain might vote on purely geographical lines. We then examine this voting pattern which provides us with some sense of how important the new configuration of political parties might be to the election next week.

physics.soc-ph↗