The New Science of Cities

by Michael Batty

A proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks.

In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that compose the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function.

Batty presents the foundations of a new science of cities, defining flows and their networks and introducing tools that can be applied to understanding different aspects of city structure. He examines the size of cities, their internal order, the transport routes that define them, and the locations that fix these networks. He introduces methods of simulation that range from simple stochastic models to bottom-up evolutionary models to aggregate land-use transportation models. Then, using largely the same tools, he presents design and decision-making models that predict interactions and flows in future cities. These networks emphasize a notion with relevance for future research and that design of cities is collective action.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urbanism, Urban, Science, Cities, Urban Planning, Architecture

730 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Between the traditional and the new, or between order and adventure, there is no real opposition; and what we call tradition today is a knit work of centuries of adventure."
- Jorge Luis Borges

This is a generic manual for how can simulation contribute to the foundation of a new city science. A science here in its classical definition of a set of knowledge that holds together through some theories and that remains verifiable for as long as we live...

Now if you're a bit into urban planning and theories you'd know how it's a little bit complicated to even devise "verifiability" and "replicability" of a planning theory: there are just too many actors, problems and policies to be able to come up with a science.
But what if I tell you that's exactly what the scope of complexity science looks like...

This book was about gathering some complexity science tools and theories to try modeling cities and inferring a few teachings after doing so. Of course we are still at the beginning of the adventure as Borges quotes says, but so far the results were dashing. Starting from Space Syntax theory founded by Hanson and Hillier, or Cellular Automata's application in understanding "human settlements".

The highlight of this book according to me is including human interaction in these models. It was easier to develop physical models - Abstraction faite of the social component - but even now it's still heavily relating to aggregation and economic theories to either model or explain a behaviour...

In short : City Science = Model thinking + Network Sciences. (this is an ultra reductionist way of summing up the book for the sake of practicality)

Also, reading this book requires basic knowledge of network statistics, matrix, and statistics in general... You've been warned!

There's just a lot of Markov inside, and just as I remember a mathematician once asked : Markov's models can't memorize their previous states, how does that impact the model then?

Haven't found an answer yet!

[Doğa Armangil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable academic textbook.