A Hudson-Smith

Scaling and Allometry in the Building Geometries of Greater London

Abstract.Many aggregate distributions of urban activities such as city nsizes reveal scaling but hardly any work exists on the properties of spatial ndistributions within individual cities, notwithstanding considerable nknowledge about their fractal structure. We redress this here by examining nscaling relationships in a world city using data on the geometric properties nof individual buildings. We first summarise how power laws can be used to napproximate the size distributions of buildings, in analogy to city-size ndistributions which have been widely studied as rank-size and lognormal ndistributions following Zipf [Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Addison-Wesley, Cambridge, 1949)] and Gibrat [Les Inégalités Économiques (Librarie du Recueil Sirey, Paris, 1931)]. We then extend this nanalysis to allometric relationships between buildings in terms of their ndifferent geometric size properties. We present some preliminary analysis of nbuilding heights from the Emporis database which suggests very nstrong scaling in world cities. The data base for Greater London is then nintroduced from which we extract 3.6 million buildings whose scaling nproperties we explore. We examine key allometric relationships between these ndifferent properties illustrating how building shape changes according to nsize, and we extend this analysis to the classification of buildings naccording to land use types. We conclude with an analysis of two-point ncorrelation functions of building geometries which supports our non-spatial nanalysis of scaling.nn

Imagining the recursive city: explorations in urban simulacra

Cities are microcosms of societies, worlds within worlds, which repeat themselves atdifferent spatial scales and over different time horizons. In this essay, we argue that suchrecursion is taken to an entirely new level in the digital age where we can represent citiesnumerically, embed them within computers, scale and distort their representations so thatwe can embed them within one another, even believing them to be ?computers? in theirown right. We begin with the conundrum of recursion, showing how its occurrence incities through spatial similarity at different scales, leads to worlds within worlds. Weillustrate these ideas with a large-scale digital representation of the core of a world city,London, showing how we can generate different realizations of the city for differentpurposes. We embed these representations within one another, building virtual worlds,moving from the material to the digital and back again, using the digital model torepresent the material world in different ways, and finally printing ? fabricating themodel. Our message is that digital representation opens a cornucopia of possibilities inrepresentation and communication through a variety of devices which in turn can beembedded in the city, Escher-like, and which indeed are rapidly becoming the city.

Digital Cornucopias: Changing Conceptions of the Virtual City

It is fifty years since the invention of the integrated circuit and thirty-five years since the microprocessor heralded the development of personal and thence all-pervasive computing. The digital world that has since emerged touches us everywhere. There is barely any area of modern life which is not informed by contemporary computation, and although steps towards artificial intelligence are still painfully slow, most of the world around us can now be represented digitally in some fashion. Representation, in fact, has become the dominant sign of digital culture, beginning more than half a century ago with numerical representation; extending into words and pictures with the development of the personal computer from the 1980s onwards, and now moving rapidly into sound, touch, and other human senses. This culture complements and never replaces conventional media, but it engages a transformation in the ways we might manipulate information that is both subtle and far reaching. Once a phenomena or process can be represented digitally, it can be copied over and over again. In short, it can be disseminated across space and time without limits. The other side of the representational coin is thus communication, and much, if not most, digital culture is focused on ways of communicating and disseminating words, pictures, sounds, and numbers. Of course once representation is digital, the phenomena in question can be manipulated by various forms of computation which transform the initial representation. In their simplest sense, digital data can be changed by adding to their value, combining them with other data, or seeking to produce analyses of those data that transform them for purposes different from their initial application. In a scientific sense, data are information that can be transformed through the application of formal ideas to their interpretation, thus generating new forms of data and information as, for example, in the testing and development of theory and models and their use for prediction, policy making, and design. The earliest information technologies tended to focus on digital representation of phenomena in a unique form for single purposes, but, as the revolution has gathered pace, when a phenomenon is represented digitally, it can be used and adapted to more than one medium. In a sense using the same representations in different media tends to change the representation by adding value in different ways, but a more powerful form is to embed the same representation into different media, simultaneously viewing the phenomena from many different standpoints. For example, in visual terms, ways of communicating phenomena range from interfacing the user through static web pages, to games, to virtual worlds, to mapping, to various animated and interactive forms. Increasingly these media are being used to interface the user simultaneously with other media, Escher-like, recursively, where one representation is nested within another (Batty and Hudson-Smith, 2007). In representing the built environment, particularly at the citywide level, digital applications exist from every perspective that one can take (Batty, 2001). Cities themselves are being wired in terms of their infrastructure, as buildings and traffic systems become automated and as human movements within the urban fabric are tracked and monitored through remote and personal information technologies, from CCTV to mobile phones. Much of this data is going online into databanks from which realtime access is increasingly possible and likely. In contrast to the real city becoming Editorial Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2006, volume 33, pages 799 ^ 802

Talking to GNOMEs: Exploring Privacy and Trust Around Internet of Things Devices in a Public Space

Privacy issues can be difficult for end-users to understand and are therefore a key concern for information-sharing systems. This paper describes a deployment of fifteen Bluetooth-beacon-enabled creatures spread across Londons Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which initiate conversations on mobile phones in their vicinity via push notifications. Playing on the common assumption that neutral public settings promote anonymity, users willingness to converse with personified chatbots is used as a proxy for understanding their inclination to share personal and potentially disclosing information. Each creature is linked to a conversational agent that asks for users memories and their responses are then shared with other creatures in the network. This paper presents the design of an interactive device used to test users awareness of how their information propagates to others.

Measuring Interaction in Workplaces

Interactions in the workplace have long been studied by the architectural research community, however, in the past, the majority of those contributions focused on single case studies. Drawing on a much larger empirical sample of 27 offices, this chapter aims at establishing a baseline of understanding how the physical structure of office buildings shapes human behaviours of interaction. This may form a foundation for the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community to investigate the impact of embedded computer technology on human behaviours inside buildings. Methods of data collection included an analysis of floor plans with Space Syntax techniques and direct observations of space usage patterns. Exploring this data, different patterns emerged: interactions appeared unevenly distributed in space; interaction rates as well as preferences for locations varied by industry; spatial configuration appeared to create affordances for interaction, since unplanned interactions outside of meeting rooms tended to cluster in more visually connected areas of the office; in addition, seven different micro-behaviours of interaction were identified, each of them driven by affordances in both the built environment and the presence of other people; last but not least, locations for interactions showed clear time-space routines. The chapter closes with interpretations of the results, reflecting on the problem of predictability and how these insights could be useful for evidence-based design, but also the HCI community. It also gives an outlook on future developments regarding the constant logging of human behaviours in offices with emerging technologies.