Michael Batty

Batty argues that a city cannot be designed top-down because that is not how it works: its form emerges from millions of small decisions influencing one another. His computational models do not predict the future, they let you see which mechanisms produce which patterns.

He also brought a solid empirical finding: cities show regularities of scale — in street length, in density, in consumption — that repeat across very different cultures and periods. Understanding them is the difference between planning with the system or against it.

A British geographer and planner, Batty founded in 1995 the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, which he turned into the world's reference laboratory in urban models and data science applied to cities. He had begun in the 1970s with Urban Modelling (1976), in the first generation of spatial interaction models, and in Fractal Cities (1994, with Paul Longley) he showed that urban fabrics repeat the same branching structure at every scale.

Cities and Complexity (2005), The New Science of Cities (2013) and Inventing Future Cities (2018) develop his thesis that the city is a complex system emerging from the bottom up, and his work with Luís Bettencourt and Geoffrey West on scaling laws showed that when population doubles, cities more than proportionally multiply their output and their innovation. Editor for decades of the journal Environment and Planning B, he has trained a good part of those who today model the transport, growth and energy of cities.