The Role of Modelling in London Plans

In the 25 years since work started on the London Plan, virtually no use has been made of systematic modelling. Instead the City Hall planners have resolutely insisted that plans should be based on simple trend projections, prepared separately for key variables: population, jobs, migration, economic growth. Thus the plans and the public debates could never address questions like “what if growth were faster or slower?” or “What would be the housing affordability impact of higher densities?” or “what would be the effect on emissions of alternative transport policies?" Perhaps modelling became unfashionable after the 20th century rejection of crude land use and transport models which had produced car-dominated cities in the rich world.

Transport modelling does live on in the parallel world of TfL but now that a new team of planners is about to start work on a new London Plan it is time to reflect on what could best be done to manage an increasingly uncertain future.

In this seminar we shall hear from a panel of UCL (Bartlett, CASA) speakers who have been working on innovations in modelling: Richard Milton, Duncan Robinson Robin Morphet and Zhixuan (Willow) Liu The combined initial talks are planned to last 45 minutes so there will be time for discussion. Please do come if you find these issues interesting, whether or not you have any expert knowledge. Richard Milton will outline QUANT, or Quantitative Urban ANalytics forecasting, is a LUTI model built at the scale of England, Scotland and Wales, using 8,436 MSOA zones. This allows us to model the effects of large scale transport plans, for example, Crossrail and HS2.

The model has been released online as a website, or can be used internally with urban planners using our touch table interface. We will discuss the technical challenges of running an urban model at this scale, and show how the speed necessary for this immediate form of urban modelling to be interactive to users has allowed us to scale up even further when running on High Performance Computing like the Data Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure, enabling us to run millions of computer generated UK scenarios for exploratory analysis. Robin Morphet will discuss the interpretation and potential use of modelling in the context of work on the Cambridge-Oxford corridor to estimate elasticities of agglomeration using rents synthesised from a gravity model for the region.

Zhixuan (Willow) Liu will discuss the impact of the East West Railway on land use changes in the CaMKOx area (Cambridge, Milton Keynes, and Oxford Corridor) and its potential future application to economic aspects. Duncan Smith will discuss housing challenges in the wider London region and options for Green Belt reform, using the latest EPC and planning data.

This is a Hybrid event