Today our paper about the evolution of world city subway networks is published online in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. We compare a dozen subway networks around the world in large cities using various graph theoretic network measures. We don’t normally advertise our papers in this way but the Royal Society put out a press release and we have some publicity with commentary from Marc Barthelemy in Wired Science and in Scientific American online. The abstract of our paper “A long-time limit for world subway networks” by Camille Roth, Soong Moon Kang from UCL Management Sciences here, myself (Michael Batty) and Marc Barthelemy can by clicking this link; and you can get a pdf copy by clicking here. Camille and Marc are based at  CAMS (CNRS/EHESS),Paris,France.

Jason Silva’s wonderful demonstration of patterns and order across many evolving spatial systems is what our science of cities is all about: flows, interactions, dynamics, self-similiarity, hierarchy and of course fractals. Take a look. These patterns swirl around all our systems from ourselves to that which we create.

 Click the map to start the wind flowing*

Many years ago, Waldo Tobler provided the inspiration for mapping and modelling flows as potentials, possibly following Ravenstein, developing the simple concept of an ‘interaction wind’. His insight continues and now with new software like Processing we can visualize everything from Tweets in Manhattan to the Real Wind. Click through. Here is a link to one of Waldo’s early papers. You can see Ravenstein’s migration currents from one of Waldo’s maps which we reproduced on A Science of Cities website, here.

*(if the map doesn’t load, you may need a easy browser like Chrome)