Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) is a research centre at University College London (UCL) which specialises in the application and visualisation of spatial analytic techniques and simulation models to cities and regions.

CASA was established in 1995 by a group of UCL academics who wanted a focus for their research across different academic departments in the field of geographic information systems (GIS). Michael Batty was appointed the first director and initially held a joint appointment as Professor of Spatial Analysis and Planning in the Departments of Geography and The Bartlett School of Planning. He is now Chairman of the Centre. In 2000, Paul Longley was appointed Deputy Director and Professor of Geographic Information Science. He now directs UCL's ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC). CASA is still largely funded through research grants but from 2010 it began to diversify, introducing Masters programmes in spatial analysis and in Smart Cities. Professor Andrew Hudson-Smith took over the directorship in 2011 and appointed a Deputy Director, Dr Adam Dennet, in 2016. The Masters courses developed since 2010 include the MSc in Smart Cities and Urban Analytics and the MRes in Data Science and Visualisation. It currently has 6 lecturers and 2 teaching fellows leading its courses. Sir Alan Wilson was appointed Professor of Urban and Regional Systems in 2008. The Centre is now an administrative unit in The Bartlett School which is the Faculty of the Built Environment.

CASA researches the science of cities, working with city governments and related research groups on simulating and visualising urban problems. Their work on transport and movement has included Transport for London’s Oyster card data, public bikes schemes such as the Barclays Cycle Hire, population segregation in large cities as well as climate change in the London region. The centre is active in exploring how the Internet of Things can be deployed in large urban areas linking objects in the built environment through internet technologies, and is currently active with the Technology Strategy Board’s Future Cities Catapult in pioneering new software systems for smart cities such as dashboards and portals. Its research programme in city science concentrates on applying social physics to urban systems based on modelling the diffusion of behaviours such as the 2011 London riots and it is heavily involved in using methods of scaling and allometry to examine city performance.

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