simulating urban space use

How do people use spaces? Or to put it another way, how consistent are the proposed/designed spaces with the way they are actually used, and what kinds of informal/spontaneous/unexpected uses does a space finally host?

blog revival

It feels like it’s time to revive this blog, with a quick summary of major/interesting projects completed within this last year.

Pedestrian stand-off: a model

As a follow-up to the pedestrian stand-off game, I have created a simple model of the scenario. It is an agent-based model, where agents wandering randomly in space play a single turn of the pedestrian stand-off  each time they meet. 

pedestrian stand-off

These past few weeks I’ve been doing some reading on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is an interesting scenario used in game theory, especially its iterated version, on which there is a very interesting book as well, if someone is interested in an introduction to game theory. This reading is done partly because of an assignment, and partly because I think the iterated version of it might apply to certain urban phenomena (post to follow, as soon as I manage to wrap my head around the concept). However, yesterday I reached the point where I thought that I might have slightly overdone it with the reading.

accidentally, a World Map

Today’s post was inspired by Frank Jacobs’ post on accidental cartography here.

I was reading through the article, and quickly found myself checking the article’s images against world maps and comparing the similarities. So I did what any person with image-processing software installed on his laptop would do: I combined the images into a world map.

music venues heatmap visualisation

The first term of my studies at CASA is coming to an end, and I have to say that only now I am starting to fully enjoy the time spent studying here. The reason for this late appreciation is that only now I have managed to finally put to use the skills acquired during the first term. And what I mean by ‘put to use’ is on something that is not a course assignment, and is more a personal project. The result is a map of music venues located in and around central London.

evolutionarily stable strategies in urban context

What follows is an excerpt from a short essay I wrote. I think it encompasses the purpose of this blog really well. It constitutes a proposal for adapting the concept of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS), from evolutionary biology to urban systems. For a quick reference on what an ESS is, refer to the wikipedia article.

we now have an ‘about’ page

As the title says, the “about” page has been updated.

Make your way there, to get a short idea of what this blog is about.

hello World!

As the title says, this is the obligatory “Hello World!” first post.
More information concerning this here corner of the internet, soon to follow.