Michael Batty

Batty treats cities as systems that emerge from many interacting decisions rather than as structures controlled by a single plan. His models examine how movement, land use, networks, and population patterns combine to produce large-scale urban form.

Batty was a founding figure and longtime leader of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. CASA became known for applying geographic information systems, computation, visualization, and mathematical modeling to cities.

Cities and Complexity is one of his central books on modeling urban form through networks, dynamics, and simulation. His later book The New Science of Cities places relationships, flows, and interactions at the center of urban analysis.

Cellular automata divide space into cells whose states change according to local rules. Batty and other urban modelers use them to explore how repeated local development decisions can generate broader patterns of growth and land use.