The Computable City - Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions

The Computable City - Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions

How computers simulate cities and how they are also being embedded in cities, changing our behavior and the way in which cities evolve.

At every stage in the history of computers and communications, it is safe to say we have been unable to predict what happens next. When computers first appeared nearly seventy-five years ago, primitive computer models were used to help understand and plan cities, but as computers became faster, smaller, more powerful, and ever more ubiquitous, cities themselves began to embrace them. As a result, the smart city emerged. In The Computable City, Michael Batty investigates the circularity of this peculiar evolution: how computers and communications changed the very nature of our city models, which, in turn, are used to simulate systems composed of those same computers.

Batty first charts the origins of computers and examines how our computational urban models have developed and how they have been enriched by computer graphics. He then explores the sequence of digital revolutions and how they are converging, focusing on continual changes in new technologies, as well as the twenty-first-century surge in social media, platform economies, and the planning of the smart city. He concludes by revisiting the digital transformation as it continues to confound us, with the understanding that the city, now a high-frequency twenty-four-hour version of itself, changes our understanding of what is possible.

Content

1. The Unpredictable Technology

I. COMPUTERS AND INFORMATION

2. The Information Mile
3. Turing's Legacy
4. The PC Revolution
5. Networks: The Final Piece of the Jigsaw

II. CITIES AND URBANIZATION

6. The Standard Model
7. The Death of Distance
8. Building Cyberspace
9. High- and Low-Frequency Cities

III. MODELS AND COMPUTATION

10. Simulation, Modeling, and Prediction
11. Drawing, Mapping, and Painting the City
12. Big Data and Urban Analytics
13. Digital Cities and Virtual Realities

IV. PLANNING AND ORGANIZATION

14. The Technological Convergence
15. The Twenty-First-Century Technology Surge
16. Organizing Smart Cities
17. The Unpredictable City

About the author

Michael Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London, where he is Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and a Turing Fellow in the Alan Turing Institute. He is the author of Inventing Future Cities, The New Science of Cities, and Cities and Complexity (all MIT Press). He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and the Royal Society (FRS) and was awarded the CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2004. He was made a Fellow of the Geographical Society of China in 2022.

Reviews

“The Computable City is a masterwork. Bringing together enormous knowledge of computer science, artificial intelligence, complex models, and urbanism, Michael Batty shows how cities stand at the very center of the new digital technologies that are reshaping our world—not only by transforming the way we communicate, work, shop, travel, and get around but as part and parcel of a new expanded, technological enabled process of urbanization and development.”

Richard Florida, Professor, University of Toronto; author of The Rise of the Creative Class“Michael Batty is one of the most recognized and authoritative voices on urban science. The Computable City is an illuminating account of the evolution of the complex terrain of urban/data interfaces, considering the transformation of the urban world through computing and its impact on the urban future.”

Susan Parnell, Professor of Human Geography, University of Bristol; Emeritus Professor, University of Cape Town