Urban Dynamics Lab: Spatial analytics for urban and regional development

Overview

The Urban Dynamics Lab at UCL aims to transform the way that regional policy is created to allow much greater local sensitivity to context, while at the same time learning from evidence what works and what does not in different locations. It launched in 2015 as a five year, £5m research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) bringing together expertise from across UCL (Space Syntax, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, Geography and Computer Science), to explore and address questions at the intersection of city and regional economic development and urban modelling, data analytics and computing. These challenges are key to tackling the vexed question of regional competitiveness and the imbalances of the UK economy.

Policy measures and incentives can be considered as perturbing the trajectory of economic development on a ‘fitness landscape’, representing the structural context defining a region. In order to forecast and intervene effectively, one needs to understand the shape of the fitness landscape, the way this may be affected by planned infrastructure, and the likely effects of policy nudges.

Data sets are increasingly available to inform this process, but without new analytics, researchers struggle with the size and complexity of the challenge, and decisions are based on projections of past trends, ideology and gut instinct. To this end, the lab developed sets of analytical tools for ‘deep’ data mining and the construction and use of computer simulation models, whilst also addressing the challenges of access to and handling of sensitive and expensive 'real-world' data.

The lab delivered impact by increasing interaction between the communities of research, policymakers and the wider public, developing support networks, workshops and annual awards to build a community of practice across the UK's cities and regions. The open source technology platform supports this by making available the tools needed to develop policy customised to the specific local context of different regions while maintaining comparability of methodology and evidence.