MCCHE Precision Convergence Webinar Series with Michael Batty
When All the World’s A City: Defining Cities in the Information Age
By Michael Batty
University College London
Date: Jun 12, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Location: Online
Abstract
Cities first emerged in the middle east some 6000 years ago, largely as a response to the markets that were formed to distribute the surplus production associated with the move to settled agriculture. But for much of the last 10,000 years since our nomadic existence evolved into agriculture, most cities have been small very rarely growing beyond one million in population. The industrial revolution changed all this due to new transportation technologies based on the internal combustion engine whence we could live at much further distances from their cores or markets. Cities began to sprawl, fragment, and fuse and it is no exaggeration to say that by the end of this century, we will all be living in cities of one form or another. New information technologies continue to change this picture and increasingly the physical form of cities is no longer is the lodestone of what a city is. In this talk, I will explore the notion that cities and urbanisation are now underpinned by networks of many kinds, and I will then illustrate how we can articulate changing definitions of cities using information networks that let us see the concept of the city on many different levels.
