Biography
Alan is Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing at The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London, and Director of the VR Centre for the Built Environment. His research focuses on understanding the way that the design of the built environment affects the patterns of social and economic behaviour of organisations and communities. How is it that architecture and urban design matter for those that inhabit them? How is it that the spatial design of cities and neighborhoods leads to the generation of cultural and community identity? How is it that spatial design relates to patterns of poverty and ethnicity especially under conditions of in-migration? Under what conditions do vital and thriving creative communities occur, and under what conditions does crime and urban malaise develop? In order to investigate these questions he has developed both research methodologies and software tools. These are known as ‘space syntax’ methods.
Current research includes the development of agent based simulations of human behaviour, the development of spatio-temporal representations of built environments, investigations of scaling properties of urban spatial networks and the application of these techniques in studies of urban sustainability in the broadest sense, covering social, economic, environmental and institutional dimensions. He was the founding Chair of the RIBA’s Research and Innovation Committee, and served in that role until 2006.
