GSD coordinator involved in substantial research grant award to UCL

The Centre for Applied Spatial Analysis at UCL has been awarded a grant of circa £3m by EPSRC to develop a programme in global dynamics and complexity theory. Prof. Steven Bishop will be one of the ten UCL academics who will build models of migration, trade, security, and development.

The research programme will be entitled: ENFOLD-ing, and will develop new forms of science which address the most difficult of human problems: those that involve global change where there is no organised constituency and whose agencies are largely regarded as being ineffective. We will argue that global systems tend to be treated in isolation from one another and that the unexpected dynamics that characterises their behaviour is due to their coupling and integration that is all to often ignored.

To demonstrate this dynamics and to develop appropriate policy responses, we will study four related global systems:trade, migration, security (which includes crime, terrorism and military disputes) and development aid which tend to be determined as a consequence of these three individual systems. The idea that this dynamics results from coupling suggests that to get a clear view of their dynamics and a better understanding of global change, we need to develop integrated and coupled models whose dynamics can be described in the conventional and perhaps not so conventional language of complexity theory: chaos, turbulence, bifurcations, catastrophes, and phase transition.

In this way the ENFOLD-ing research programme addresses some of the problems outlined by the work of the GSD project.

Other UCL researchers involved will be: Alan Wilson and Michael Batty, CASA; Francesca Medda Transport; Alex Braithwaite, Political Science; Alasdair Turner and Sean Hanna, Bartlett School of Graduate Studies; Shane Johnson, Jill Dando Institute for Crime Science; Frank Smith, Mathematics; and Pablo Mateos, Geography.

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