---
id: people/michael-batty
about:
  label: Michael Batty
  depiction: people/michael-batty.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Pymouss, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.'
  description: >-
    British urban modeller, Bartlett Professor of Planning at UCL and chair of
    CASA, whose books set out the bottom-up, complexity view of cities.
  tags:
    - urban modelling
    - complexity
    - cellular automata
    - agent-based model
person:
  affiliation: University College London
  role: urban modeller
  homepage: 'http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/'
relations:
  - predicate: member_of
    target: organizations/casa-ucl
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Michael Batty (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Batty'
    - title: 'Michael Batty (Joint Lab on Future Cities, University of Hong Kong)'
      url: 'https://jlfc.hku.hk/people/michael-batty/'
    - title: Smart Cities (Michael Batty's lecture and blog site)
      url: 'http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Michael Batty, born in Liverpool on 11 January 1945, is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London and chair of its Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, which was set up when he joined UCL in 1995.[^1,2] He studied town and country planning at Manchester and taught at Reading and at Cardiff, and from 1990 directed the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at Buffalo.[^1] He edits Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the British Academy.[^1,2]

His research has been on computer models of cities and their visualisation, beginning with aggregate land-use and transport models and moving, with Paul Longley's Fractal Cities, to the idea that city form grows from the bottom up through self-similar processes.[^1,2] [Cities and Complexity](/media/cities-and-complexity/), from 2005, places urban dynamics inside complexity theory. [The New Science of Cities](/media/the-new-science-of-cities/), from 2013, argues that flows matter more than locations for understanding and planning cities. Each won the William Alonso Prize of the Regional Science Association.[^1] [Inventing Future Cities](/media/inventing-future-cities/) (2018) holds that the future of a city can be invented but not predicted.[^1]

He co-edited [Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems](/media/agent-based-models-of-geographical-systems/) and [Urban Informatics](/media/urban-informatics/), and the wiki's entry on [CASA](/organizations/casa-ucl/) names him as its first director. He posts his lecture notes on his own site.[^3]