Placetique

Category: Front Page

  • Last night a DB saved my life (Part 2)

    Last night a DB saved my life (Part 2)

    Following on from my last post about what DuckDB makes possible, here’s a little more detail about how this works in practice… Installing DuckDB There are two ways to use DuckDB: via the Command Line (CLI/Terminal), and via a library for whatever language you’re programming in. I tend to use the CLI more intensively while…

  • Last night a DB saved my life (Part 1)

    Last night a DB saved my life (Part 1)

    Every so often, a technology comes along that is magical in how well it works, and transformative in terms of its impact on your work. Wifi was one of those: I *still* remember the first time I used it and the computer that I used it on. There was no going back to cat-5 at…

  • Mapping the Changing Affordability of Manchester

    Building on yesterday’s post about my London affordability maps, here are the equivalent maps for the Manchester area (sorry Liverpool, I’ll get there!) from 1997 and 2012. It’s obviously a very different picture in terms of price, volume and distribution; these differences were well-known anecdotally but a lot of the detail was hidden until the Land…

  • Mapping the Changing Affordability of London

    Last night I discovered how many of my friends watch C4’s Dispatches since quite a few of them texted me to say that they had seen me talking about property affordability on “The Great British Property Divide”. However, since Dispatches has to somehow keep the running time down to just 30 minutes, there’s not much of a…

  • ‘Mapping the Space of Flows’: the geography of the London Mega-City Region

    I’m pleased to be able to post here the penultimate version of an article that Duncan Smith and I recently had accepted to Regional Studies. In this article we look at ways of combining ‘big data’ from a telecoms network with standard BRES employment data to generate a more nuanced understanding of where ‘work’ happens…

  • Bridging the Qual/Quant Divide

    I’ve been in my new post in the Geography department at King’s College London for nearly nine months now and — together with another new-ish colleague — have been asked to design a programme to teach quantitative research methods to students who often seem to think that their interests are solely qualitative.

  • Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 2)

    In my previous post I looked at some of the issues affecting the extent to which ‘big data’ gives a reliable picture of the world around us. In this post I want to take you through one of the least sexy—but most important—parts: the data itself. My point, again, is not to suggest that big…

  • Problems of Scale

    So on Friday I went to hear my supervisor, Peter Hall, on a panel discussion with Hank Ditmar (of the Prince’s Foundation) and Will Alsop (famous architect/urban designer). The title for the discussion was “The Object, the City & the Region“, which didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with the actual discussion…