The Computable City: Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions

Abstract: 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 75 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 this book, 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 21st-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.

About the Speaker:

Michael Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London, and Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualisation since the 1970s with his recent publications reflecting recent developments in urban science in Cities and Complexity (2005), The New Science of Cities (2013), and Inventing Future Cities (2018) all from The MIT Press. His recent book The Computable City (2023) is a history of how computers and digital technologies have and are changing the form and function of cities. From 1979 to 1990, he was Professor of Town Planning and Dean of the School of Environmental Design at the University of Wales at Cardiff and then from 1990-1995, Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Royal Society (FRS), and the Academy of Social Sciences. He was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2004. He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (2015) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute. He has been the editor of Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, since 1982. He is an overseas member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.