The PAIR Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Michael BATTY, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London, was successfully held on 1 September 2023. The lecture was moved completely online due to special arrangements under adverse weather conditions. The webinar attracted over 300 participants from more than 30 countries and regions. It was also broadcasted live on multiple social media platforms, including Bilibili and Weibo, and was viewed by an online audience of over 11,000 in total.
In the lecture, Prof. Batty gave an overview of the development of the science of cities in the last 50 years. Drawing on the system approach and complex theory, he explained that urban science involves top-down and bottom-up thinking; it is a systematic, complex and evolving discipline built on knowledge in social physics, economics, transportation and numerous scientific methods that yield theories. He illustrated this with city morphology examples from the UK and the Greater Bay Areas (GBA) generated by large-scale computer models. At the end of the lecture, Prof. Batty described some challenges with fractal geometry, size and scaling, networks, and building models currently faced by the field, and he suggested the way forward for the discipline.
A question-and-answer session moderated by Prof. CHEN Qingyan, Director of PAIR, and Prof. John SHI Wenzhong, Director of the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Smart Cities Research Institute, followed. The audience was inspired to have a fruitful exchange with Prof. Batty.
