Role & Project:
Carlos Molinero is currently a research associate on the Urban Dynamics Lab project. This work is oriented towards defining and understanding the issues around the spatial economic imbalance in the UK. The UDL is an inter-departmental project at UCL led by Professor Alan Penn, Professor Michael Batty and Dr Elsa Arcaute (CASA), Professor Sir Alan Wilson (Alan Turing Institute and CASA), Professor Paul Longley (UCL Geography and CDRC) and Professor Philip Treleaven (UCL Computer Science).
How would you summarise your personal research?
My research interests lay in the understanding of cities as evolving systems and how from the aggregation of partial temporally and culturally situated decisions can emerge another level of order with its own set of rules which can be studied by treating it as a complex system.
The research I am undertaking is in the field of network theory and the study of how processes such as percolation and the study of the fractal dimensions of the system can help us explore the hierarchical description of road networks and uncover some historical and cultural/social traits along the way. A complementary side of this research is the study of centrality measures of urban networks and the extent to which these measures are capable of explaining different socio-economic phenomena.
Tell us a little about the research you’re doing at the moment:
I am currently working in the description of systems from the point of view of their hierarchical structure be it of regions and cities or literally the hierarchical ordering happening in the road network. I am also studying how these hierarchies are conforming certain aspects of our society - for example, we are studying whether the structure of regions has any influence on the voting behaviour of the population.
What is your favourite thing about CASA?
The multidisciplinary environment at CASA has given me the opportunity to learn greatly about a variety of topics, to ask questions that I did not know how to ask before. It is always the people that form a department, and I am lucky to have developed and grown as a researcher surrounded by my current and past colleagues.
Where can people find out more about your work?
Recent papers:
C. Molinero, R. Murcio, E. Arcaute. The angular nature of road networks. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 4312 (2017). DOI:10.1038/s41598-017-04477-z
Arcaute, E., Molinero, C., Hatna, E., Murcio, R., Vargas-Ruiz, C., Masucci, A.P. and Batty, M., 2016. Cities and regions in Britain through hierarchical percolation. Royal Society open science, 3(4), p.150691. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.150691