Prof Michael Batty’s research is sited within City Science – the practice of modelling the growth and evolution of cities to inform future urban design. The Computable City: Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions, published by MIT Press, focuses on the place of computing within this field, charting the history of computer modelling in understanding and planning cities since the first models were developed in the late 1950s in the US.
The new book tells the story of the growing sophistication of computational urban modelling; explores the history of digital revolutions and the influence of social media and platform economies; and tracks the emergence of the smart city – defined by the proliferation of open data and interconnectivity, and using technologies including artificial intelligence and big data analytics to optimise transport, governance, infrastructure and sustainability. Prof Batty argues that as we have developed better science, the computers that harness it have become so small and fast that they are embedded in the form, function and life of the city itself, to the extent that the modern city approximates a form of networked computing, yielding big data on a scale never seen before.
It is impossible to predict the future but as planners and designers, we have the luxury of being able to invent it. Our inventions may be good or bad, but we need to fashion our tools to ensure our designs become better and better. But we face the double bind that although we can invent the future city, we cannot predict what we will invent. This has always been the greatest challenge in architecture and planning.
– Prof Michael Batty
Prof Michael Batty is Emeritus Professor of Planning at The Bartlett, and Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualisation since the 1970s and has published three other books about City Science – Cities and Complexity (winner of the Alonso Prize of the Regional Science Association in 2011), The New Science of Cities and Inventing Future Cities, all published by MIT Press. During the Covid-19 pandemic he ran the Digital Task Force for Planning with CASA’s Dr Wei Yang. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society, and the recipient of a CBE, the Nobel de Géographie, the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Senior Scholars Award of the Complex Systems Society.
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