Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL

The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) is a research centre at University College London (UCL), part of The Bartlett, UCL's Faculty of the Built Environment.^1,2 It applies spatial analysis, simulation models and visualisation to cities and regions, and describes its subject as the science of cities.^1,5 A group of UCL academics working on geographic information systems (GIS, software for mapping and analysing located data) set it up in 1995, with Michael Batty as its first director.¹

According to Wikipedia, CASA works with city governments on simulating and visualising urban problems, including studies of movement from Transport for London's Oyster card data and London's cycle hire scheme, segregation in large cities and climate change in the London region.¹ Wikipedia also says that OpenStreetMap originated at CASA and The Bartlett.¹ Among the books it lists as reflecting CASA's research are Batty's Cities and Complexity (2005) and The New Science of Cities (2013), and the edited volume Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems (2012).¹

From 2010 CASA added master's teaching, with MSc programmes in smart cities and urban analytics and in spatial data science and visualisation.¹ Some of that teaching is open to anyone. CASA0005, Geographic Information Systems and Science, a compulsory module on both MSc programmes, was rewritten in 2019 as an online interactive book, taught mainly in the R programming language with some use of the QGIS desktop program.² It covers mapping, cleaning and joining spatial data, spatial statistics such as hot-spot analysis, and spatial regression, using real government and academic datasets.^2,3 The current year's handbook is published free on the web, earlier years are kept in separate repositories, and the material is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.^2,4 Its authors, Andrew MacLachlan and Adam Dennett, described it in the Journal of Open Source Education in 2022.²

For someone starting to model a city or region, CASA is useful in two ways: its books set out the thinking behind bottom-up urban simulation, and the CASA0005 handbook is a free, worked course in the spatial data handling that any such model needs first.