Michael Batty

Chair and Professor of Planning, UCL
Michael Batty CBE FRS FBA FAcSS FRTPI is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London. He is Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and also a Turing Fellow in the Alan Turing Institute. He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualisation since the 1970s and his recent publications Cities and Complexity (2005), The New Science of Cities (2013), and Inventing Future Cities (2018), are all published by The MIT Press. The last two of these books have been translated into Chinese. The edited book Urban Informatics (Springer 2021) reflects his focus on the applications of digital technologies to urban planning. In the 1980s, he was Professor of City Planning and Dean of the School of Environmental Design at the University of Wales at Cardiff, and prior to that a Lecturer and Reader in Geography at the University of Reading. From 1990-1995, he was Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His first degree BA was in planning from the University of Manchester in 1966 and his doctorate was architecture from the University of Wales, 1984. He has published many papers and he is very highly cited with an H index of 109.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and the Royal Society (FRS). He was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2004. He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (2015) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute (2016). He has been the editor of Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science since 1982. He is a Visiting Professor at Arizona State University and at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and chairs the Advisory Group of the DC2 project at the Centre for Smart Construction and Infrastructure at Cambridge University where he is also a member of the International Advisory Group. He is a member of the executive committee of the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure at the Science and Technology Facilities Council at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and a member of RAMP (Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic) group responsible for motivating modelling research in the pandemic organised through the Royal Society. He is the Co-Chair (with Wei Yang) of the UK Digital Taskforce for Planning, an independent group undertaking an inquiry into the need for developing digital skills and awareness in the UK Planning Profession. (www.digital4planning.com). He has a very active research programme and has recent several grants from UK and International Research Organisations including the Alan Turing Institute, The European Union Horizon 2020 Programme, and the JPI Urban Europe-NSFC Project where his group together with the University of Shenzhen, the University of Hong Kong, and Sun Yat Sen University, and the Vrie University of Amsterdam are studying the development of the Greater Bay Area.