Jon Reades

University College London | UCL · Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

Face-to-Face: The Persistent Power of Cities In a Post-Pandemic Era , is about the way that people and firms are adapting to the world of always-on and everywhere digital access, and what that means for cities and regions. Twenty years after The Death of Distance —and in the midst of a pandemic that has led some to question the future of cities—man...

This lesson uses word embeddings and clustering algorithms in Python to identify groups of similar documents in a corpus of approximately 9,000 academic abstracts. It will teach you the basics of dimensionality reduction for extracting structure from a large corpus and how to evaluate your results.

Women and gender minorities are underrepresented in positions of leadership and seniority in academia. Research on gender in higher education (HE) has varied in scale and methodological approach from large-scale global surveys to small-scale projects with interviews and focus groups, with a noticeable gap in the attention given to early career rese...

Over the past 20 years, increasing land values, a rising population and inward investment from overseas have combined to encourage the demolition and redevelopment of many large council-owned estates across London. While it is now widely speculated that this is causing gentrification and displacement, the extent to which it has forced low-income ho...

Interventions to increase active commuting have been recommended as a method to increase population physical activity, but evidence is mixed. Social norms related to travel behaviour may influence the uptake of active commuting interventions but are rarely considered in their design and evaluation. In this study we develop an agent-based model that...

Introduction: Active commuting has been recommended as a method to increase population physical activity, but evidence is mixed. Social norms related to travel behaviour may influence the uptake of active commuting interventions but are rarely considered in the design and evaluation of interventions. Methods: We developed an agent-based model that...

In an era of smart cities, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data is purported to be the 'new oil', fuelling increasingly complex analytics and assisting us to craft and invent future cities. This paper outlines the role of what we know today as big data in understanding the city and includes a summary of its evolution. Through a critic...

We cannot … regard the conditions of supply by an individual producer as typical of those which govern the general supply in a market. … Thus the history of the individual firm cannot be made into the history of an industry any more than the history of an individual man can be made into the history of mankind. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economi...

… and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1623 We have, so far, been looking at how face-to-face contact sits within the systems and markets of the modern city. Our way of thinking about businesses, place...

My Wife and family return’d to me now out of the Country, where they had been since August by reason of the Contagion, now almost universally ceasing: Blessed be God for his infinite mercy in preserving us. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, entry for 6 February 1666 In the end, it's still about the human touch: making time and making contact,...

But what is to be the fate of the great wen? The monster called … ‘the metropolis of the empire’? William Cobbett, Rural Rides, 1830 Across the arc of this book we’ve tried to set out our thoughts on the factors that will push and pull activities and people to and from our cities over the next few decades. A single book cannot possibly do justice t...

The technology is important because without it, there would be nothing. Yet what is really crucial, as before in history, is not the basic infrastructure, but what that infrastructure enables. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization, 1998 Life on the network If the 21st century has a dominant metaphor, it is the network. Network ways of thinking now per...

We witness today enormous displacements of economic forces, migrations of capital and human labor such as no other age has ever seen. We observe that certain regions rapidly grow poor in human beings and capital, while others become saturated. We see in metropolitan centers great masses conglomerate, seemingly without end. Alfred Weber, Theory of t...

Up, and with Sir W. Batten to White-hall to the Lords of the Admiralty and there did our business betimes. Thence to Sir Ph. Warwicke about Navy business – and my Lord Ashly; and afterward to my Lord Chancellor, who is very well pleased with me and my carrying his business. And so to the Change, where mighty busy; and so home to dinner, where Mr. C...

Men, thinly scattered, make a shift, but a bad shift, without many things. A smith is ten miles off: they’ll do without a nail or a staple. A taylor is far from them: they’ll botch their own clothes. It is being concentrated which produces high convenience. Dr Samuel Johnson in Boswell's Journal of A Tour To The Hebrides, entry for Sunday, 15 Augus...

geopyter, an acronym of Geographical Python Teaching Resources, provides a hub for the distribution of ‘best practice’ in computational and spatial analytic instruction, enabling instructors to quickly and flexibly remix contributed content to suit their needs and delivery framework and encouraging contributors from around the world to ‘give back’...

This contribution looks at how great-city working life and business are increasingly oriented towards the activities in high-added-value trades and 'opaque' markets, where face-to-face interactions are still a vital part of what they offer. It argues that whilst the pandemic has undoubtedly hit hard, its longer-term impacts should not be over-stres...

Starting with the basics of infrastructure, Chapter 2 shows how it un-levels the playing field, making distant places ‘close’ and near places ‘far away’. Digital networks are obviously a focus, but so too are transportation and other less glamorous systems. Networks which ‘equalise’ space exert a centrifugal force on activity and growth, spinning i...

We focus on transactions and their costs: how the where and who of ‘doing deals’ shapes choices about which business locations are more or less desirable. It unpicks the nature of the choices firms are making: what sort of transactions; what this imposes in terms of search costs; and how ICT is shifting the boundaries of these choices. Yet face-to-...

We draw together from Chapters 2–6 many of the factors that will push and pull activities and people to and from our cities over the next few decades. For the great World Cities, the future looks like continued employment growth overall, but reduced dependence on large floorplates and serried ranks of desks. Digitisation will bite ever deeper, and...

We look at how Chapter 5’s ‘people ideas’ play out in practice; it is about real people talking about real jobs. Respondents described their interactions, how much was internal or external, the frequency and nature of contacts, and how much their social and work lives interpenetrated. Strongly evident in the responses is the role of different techn...

We draw together the book’s themes. These revolve round the core importance of human contact, with face-to-face ever more important, not less, because when insight and knowledge matter F2F will always have the edge. This is despite the ever-deeper penetration of ICT, which allows more choice, accelerates change and enables unparalleled contact, but...

We focus on the people and asks what role does personal choice and interaction play? The key issue here is the role of face-to-face interaction in the transfer of complex, uncertain knowledge. It analyses the different sorts of knowledge and relationships involved in day-to-day exchanges. This leads on to the milieux for such exchange, from meeting...

We analyse how and why Central Places come to dominate particular markets for goods and services. Goods, labour, skills and data all move in different ways and at different speeds through the networks, with different ‘ranges’: critical in determining how much centrality matters in each sector. This connects to the challenges of risk and uncertainty...

This introductory chapter sketches the territory to be explored: how ICT is, and is not, changing everything; the continuing importance of face-to-face contact in many sectors; how businesses adapt to this changing and digitally-dominated landscape; and what this all means for cities and towns. It summarises the book’s ‘layered’ structure: starting...

Why do businesses still value urban life over the suburbs or countryside? This accessible book makes the case for face-to-face contact, still considered crucial to many 21st-century economies, and provides tools for thinking about the future of places from market towns to world cities.

The proliferation of large, complex data spatial data sets presents challenges to the way that regional science—and geography more widely—is researched and taught. Increasingly, it is not ‘just’ quantitative skills that are needed, but computational ones. However, the majority of undergraduate programmes have yet to offer much more than a one-off ‘...

Two global transformative changes—rapid urbanisation and mass digital disruption—are brought together in the concept of ‘Informed Urbanisation’. This approach stands in contrast with the more common and more problematic ‘accidental urbanisation’ that is unsustainable, responsive urban growth driven by population demand and economic development. Inf...

The proliferation of large, complex data spatial data sets presents challenges to the way that regional science --- and geography more widely -- is researched and taught. Increasingly, it is not 'just' quantitative skills that are needed, but computational ones. However, the majority of undergraduate programmes have yet to offer much more than a on...

This chapter describes some of the rapid developments in data collection and analysis through the processing of data collected and archived in real time that are capable of generating new insights into urban processes that in time, might lead to new theories of how cities function. It will focus on London both for its strategic importance as a glob...

Recent developments in the field of machine learning offer new ways of modelling complex socio-spatial processes, allowing us to make predictions about how and where they might manifest in the future. Drawing on earlier empirical and theoretical attempts to understand gentrification and urban change, this paper shows it is possible to analyse exist...

The discipline of Geography has long been intertwined with the use of computers. This close interaction is likely to increase with the embeddedness of computers and concomitant growth of spatially referenced data. To better understand the current situation, and to be able to better speculate about the future, this article provides two parallel pers...

The UK has had a long-standing regional house price gap with prices in London much higher than the rest of the UK. Using price data from 1969 to 2016 we track price differentials through several cycles of boom and bust, and note the growing divergence of London, particularly central London, from the rest of Britain. In explaining this divergence, w...

Over sixty years ago, geography began its so-called quantitative revolution, where for the first time statistical methods were used to explain the spatial nature of geographic phenomena. Computers made some of this possible, but their limited power did not allow for more than relatively small analytic explorations and consequently many of these ear...

[Note to SocArXiv: this article was reviewed twice by Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and ultimately rejected by the editors since 1 of the 4 reviewers felt that it didn’t merit acceptance. So, technically, this is not a pre-print as we’re currently considering where to send it for a second go. We *could* put it on an instituti...

Public transport is perhaps the most significant component of the contemporary smart city currently being automated using sensor technologies that generate data about human behaviour. This is largely due to the fact that the travel associated with such transport is highly ordered. Travellers move collectively in closed vehicles between fixed stops...

Peter Hall’s views of urban regeneration and regional development were informed by a deep appreciation of the importance of firm location and the impact that technological change—especially in communications—were having on corporate location preferences and patterns.1 Witness to the decline of manufacturing in Britain, to the rise of new industry i...

This work shows how open data and open-source software can be used to create sophisticated maps from large spatial data sets. The resulting maps enable both the fine-grained details of London’s property boom and the overarching impact that this is having on households with median earnings to be explored.

Reades J. and Smith D. A. Mapping the ‘space of flows’: the geography of global business telecommunications and employment specialization in the London mega-city-region, Regional Studies. Telecommunications has radically reshaped the way that firms organize industrial activity. And yet, because much of this technology – and the interactions that it...

We are building a series of fast, visually accessible, cross-sectional, hence static urban models for large metropolitan areas that will enable us to rapidly test many different scenarios pertaining to both short-term and long-term urban futures. We call this framework SIMULACRA which is a forum for developing many different model variants which ca...

What is the most effective way to enhance the accessibility of our oldest and largest public transportation systems for people with reduced mobility? The intersection of limits to government support with the growing mobility needs of the elderly and of people with disabilities calls for the development of tools that enable us to better prioritise i...

Just as information and communication technologies (ICT) and the digital economy are transforming everyday life, so they are transforming our ways of knowing about everyday life. The breadth of social practices that are mediated by digital infrastructure, and thus recorded by digital traces, has not gone unnoticed in the social sciences.1 Coupled w...

Understanding and predicting human mobility is a crucial component of a range of administrative activities, from transportation planning to tourism and travel management. In this paper we propose a new approach that predicts the location of a person over time based on both individual and collective behaviors. The system draws on both previous traje...

The transition to a digital, knowledge-based economy has seemingly thrown the study of industrial spatial strategy into disarray: theory rooted in the analysis of material flows appears insufficient for the study of informational ones. However, this work will argue that many of the basic, historical aspects of firm location identified by the pionee...

Comparison with null model. (0.04 MB DOC)

Inferring the network of human interactions from calling data. (0.05 MB DOC)

Comparing different modularity optimization methods. (0.06 MB DOC)

Subsampling the network data. (0.04 MB DOC)

Defining regions through the spectral modularity optimization. Results of five different modularity optimization algorithms. (5.66 MB TIF)

Definition of modularity. (0.19 MB DOC)

Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions. Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitan...

Researchers use eigendecomposition to leverage MIT's Wi-Fi network activity data and analyze to the physical environment. We proposed a method to analyze and categorize wireless access points based on common usage characteristics that reflect real-world, placed-based behaviors. It uses eigendecomposition to study the Wi-Fi network at the Massahuset...

During the last several years, researchers have begun to gain access to telecommunications data from cellular-network operators. This development heralds a methodological revolution in fields with complex and extensive data needs and the combination of continuous monitoring and real-time response would enable us to deploy increasingly intelligent i...

Several attempts have already been made to use telecommunications networks for urban research, but the datasets employed have typically been neither dynamic nor fine grained. Against this research backdrop the mobile phone network offers a compelling compromise between these extremes: it is both highly mobile and yet still localisable in space. Mor...

Much of our understanding of urban systems comes from traditional data collection methods such as surveys by person or phone. These approaches can provide detailed information about urban behaviors, but they're hard to update and might limit results to "snapshots in time." In the past few years, some innovative approaches have sought to use mobile...

Abstract

In ubiquitous computing, context is often understood as the product of active inter-device communication, but it can also emerge from the underlying network topology. To understand how this second layer can provide us with additional input ubiquitous devices, we consider aggregate data from the mobile phone network and develop an analytical tool ad...