With guest:
Zara Shabrina & Mike Batty
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Platform economy, talking to machines, the misuse of an app, and buffalo wings
Caitlin and Michele walk the city in an experimental six-legged stroll with both Zara Shabrina and Mike Batty, debating the challenges of platforms in cities and the limits of urban prediction, along with the story of AirBnB. Zara and Mike offer us an incredibly wide span of histories and viewpoints from the early days of urban studies to exciting new development in urban computing, and we nearly avoid collisions with cyclists in Green Park’s bike lanes. We walk through the limits and faults, but also the theoretical possibilities, of digital tools in cities. We hear how the sprawl of all kinds of data and capacities shape computational analytics, and how a global urban science is an art in understanding the limits of prediction. We take a stroll in Bandung, and hope for a bite in a downtown pub just off Lake Erie.
Zara (Zahratu) Shabrina is Lecturer in Geographic Data Science in the Geography Department at King’s College London, where she works on the implementation of quantitative methods on topics related to platform urbanism, urban tourism, and housing.
Mike (Michael) Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London where he is Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and has worked on computer models of cities and their visualisation since the 1970s.
If you liked our walk, you might want to follow up on Zara and Mike’s work in Urban Studies in the Related Articles section below.
And if you want more, we very much recommend Mike’s recent book:
Batty M (2024) The Computable City: Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Credits
Every Beginning Is Hard 1v46 by Setuniman
nothing more 1T37 by Setuniman
05969 common bicycle bell by Robinhood76
carrying case of beers by Tiisetso190171
Jogja Campursari Music – Java by RTB45
jalan_cikini_edit by maarten_wez
Billy on the Hill by Ben McElroy
