Michael Batty

Professor Michael Batty

Doctor of Social Science, honoris causa (2024)

A pioneer in the advanced research and methodology of mapping and visualising cities using computational methods, Professor Michael Batty is by training an urban designer and town planner whose career-long efforts have steadily advanced the transdisciplinary nexus of urban planning, geography and data science. Of particular note have been his on-going refinements to the computational modelling, dynamic simulation and data visualisation of long-term structural changes affecting cities and urban systems. Advancing along this research trajectory across the decades, Professor Batty was the Founder and Director of the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London (UCL) from 1995 to 2010, whose endowed Chair he still holds as the Emeritus Bartlett Professor of Planning.

Recently serving Hong Kong, Professor Batty has been Distinguished Vice Chancellor’s Professor and Honorary Advisor at the Institute of Future Cities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as Distinguished Visiting Chair Professor in the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has been a Croucher Fellow at the University of Hong Kong. At HKBU, Professor Batty continues to offer timely and robust assistance to the Department of Geography, in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, as part of its on-going “Smart Cities” initiative. Much to the delight of management, colleagues, and students Professor Batty last visited our campus in June 2019. Prior to serving in these roles, Professor Batty was Professor of City Planning and Dean of the School of Environmental Design at the University of Wales at Cardiff (1979-1990) and Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1990-1995). Throughout his career, Professor Batty has held various short term contracts, and has been associated on a project basis as a visiting professor at numerous other world-class institutions in Australia, Britain and Europe, and the United States.

Professor Batty’s on-going research efforts remain energetic and constitutive today. He currently serves as managing editor of the reputable, high-impact field journal Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science and continues to inspire the research of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and colleagues worldwide. Dating from the late 1970s, his championing of computer-assisted modelling for urban spatial structure has been equally foundational and leading-edge for the contemporary field. He is the author of numerous books and article-length publications, singly and collaborative, including Urban Modelling in 1976, Fractal Cities (with Paul Longley) in 1994, Cities and Complexity (2007), The New Science of Cities (2017), Inventing Future Cities (2018) and The Computable City (2024), this latter quartet of works being widely taught in university curricula worldwide and reaching multiple editions for their publisher, MIT Press. Of note with regard to the on-going currency and relevance of Professor Batty’s research: his aggregate, field-weighted citation count is approaching sixty thousand to date and his “i10-index” rating (i.e. the number of articles receiving >10 citations) has doubled across the past five years.

Accolades proclaiming Professor Batty’s career achievement have flowed from multiple institutions at diverse points of the compass, and via his timely vectoring of new directions, forces, and relationships established in far-away places. Notable amongst these awards most recently are: Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2023, and a Fellow of the Geographical Society of China in 2022; the Gold Medal, Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) awarded in 2016; Founder’s Medal, awarded by the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (2015); an Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Leicester, UK (2015); Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud (2013) also known colloquially as the “Nobel Prize for Geography”; and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, State University of New York, USA (2008). Back home in Britain, Professor Batty was first elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) as well as of the British Academy (FBA) in 2001, received the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire- the CBE - in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2004, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.

Long prior to these worthy accolades, perhaps the greatest gift and lasting legacy of Professor Batty’s lifetime achievement has been as that caring scholar and friend to the guild of global geographers in service to the better design of sustainable and “smart” cities using new digital methods and models. His methods and tools have provided urban planners with more resilient and sustainable options for modelling growth patterns describing the rise and fall of our cities over time. More effective, data-driven spatial modelling has likewise empowered architects, census takers, policy experts, culture and heritage conservationists to make better and more sustainable decisions using (or adapting) models from Professor Batty’s inspired contributions to research.

The hallmark of such global service, and its impacts upon so many urban places across diverse cultural locales, has been its underlying humanistic and ameliorating impulse. By putting advanced urban modelling tools in the hands of our global cities’ stewards, Professor Batty and his research teams’ generosity of knowledge transfer across the decades has afforded better prospects for forward posterity and prosperity, at one remove from everyday citizens making up the otherwise abstract and unceasing flows, forces, and locations of urban life. The common person, Professor Batty well knows, should be the ultimate beneficiary of his career-long efforts.

In recognition of his lasting contributions to HKBU, Hong Kong, China, and world letters in pursuit of the scholarship of smarter and sustainable cities of the highest global impact and standard, HKBU is pleased to confer upon Professor Michael Batty the Doctor of Social Sciences, honoris causa.