Overview
COSMIC: COmplexity in Spatial dynaMICs
COSMIC is an EU (ERA-Net) network project linking three research groups - the Free University of Amsterdam (VU), CASA in UCL and the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG) at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth (NUIM). The consortium focuses on urban dynamic processes using new bottom up, digital data collected for entire populations. We believe that such data will provide dramatically new insights into urban change which manifest themselves in often discontinuous forms which can be articulated using a variety of reaction-diffusion dynamics incorporating catastrophe, chaos, bifurcations, and phase transitions. In cities, such reactions range from the emergence of edge cities to patterns of residential segregation, embodying social exclusion in various forms. We are first developing a typology of urban dynamic processes to guide the development of models using new digital data collected in real time from electronic transactions such as phone lines, electronic ticketing, and related geo-sensing. Our unifying focus will be on flow data associated with underlying networks with the models revolving around spatial interaction from labour markets to pedestrian movement. VU is exploring methods for estimating dynamic models of labour markets in Germany and urban navigation in Amsterdam, CASA is developing models of movement and location from phone and ticketing data in London, while NCG is exploring movement in small scale environments represented at the building and streetscape scale in Dublin as well as journey to work patterns. The project runs from November 2010 to end 2012.
People
Michael Batty
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Andrew Hudson-Smith
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Francesca Medda
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Jon Reades
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Alan Wilson
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Outputs
Batty, M. (2010) Visualising Space-Time Dynamics in Scaling Systems, Complexity, 16, 2, 51-63.
Bentley, R. A., Ormerod, P. and Batty, M. (2011) Evolving Social Influence in Large Populations, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 65, 537-546
Ratti, C., Sobolevsky, S., Calabrese, F., Andris, C., Reades, J., Martino, M. and Strogatz, S. (2010), Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions PLoS One, 5, (12)
Reades, J. (2010) Mobile Positioning and Tracking in Geography and Planning
Finite State Machines: Preserving Privacy When Data-Mining Cellular Phone Networks, Journal of Urban Technology 17, 1, 29-40
Roth C., Kang S. M., Batty, M. and Barthelemy, M. (2011) Structure of Urban Movements: Polycentric Activity and Entangled Hierarchical Flows. PLoS One, 6, (1): e15923. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015923
Impact
We list the main impacts of the proposed research:
- generate a long overdue typology of urban dynamic processes and requisite models which enable researchers to understand the different features that are simulated when such processes are articulated using the panoply of nonlinear feedback processes based on: reaction-diffusion systems, chaotic dynamics, catastrophic sequences, self-organised critical phase transitions, morphogenetic processes, and coupled predator-prey equations.
- represent ways in which actions and interactions measured as flows on networks provide the substrata on which urban dynamic processes are built; the self-organizing features of these dynamics are realised in terms of the way flows and their networks evolve.
- explore the properties of these processes defining typical signatures of these dynamics in terms of scaling, hierarchies, entropy and diversity, resilience, and multifractality.
- measure flows using new sources of data, acquired remotely, some in real-time, from ticketing, mobile and fixed line telephone calls, and locally sensed data; these provide digital footprints for the exploration of routine and longer term dynamics across activity patterns, interactions and flow systems to locational imprints of this activity.
- develop a series of model demonstrators of these urban dynamics in each of the three research centres; first using data from hand-held devices for Amsterdam; second from telephone calls and electronic ticketing in Greater London where the focus will be on modelling traffic and spatial interaction patterns; and third from local pedestrian movements and journey to work patterns in the Dublin region.
- extend our current techniques of visualising complex spatial systems, largely based on thematic maps, flows and cartograms to extended network representations, and to embed these into Web 2.0 applications
- relate our core network informally to research groups in spatial and urban complexity at ETH Zurich, Santa Fe NM, George Mason University VA, the S4 Consortium, the SENSable City Lab at MIT, USC-Los Angeles, and CSAP at Leeds University.