The average speed of a Tube train in London is 33 km per hour (20.5mph) – including station stops. This makes capturing a panorama on the Tube tricky due to the movement of the train. Luckily these average figures don’t really tell the full story and the Tube is often subject to delays and periods of unexplained stoppages in tunnels.

Thus during a particular long delay between Mornington crescent and Camden Town we were able to fully assemble our panoramic rig and capture the resulting panorama.

View the panorama of The Tube, London (2.9Mb).

IMAGINING THE RECURSIVE CITY: EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN SIMULACRA by Prof Mike Batty and Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith

Cities are microcosms of societies, worlds within worlds, which repeat themselves at different spatial scales and over different time horizons. In this essay, we argue that such recursion is taken to an entirely new level in the digital age where we can represent cities numerically, embed them within computers, scale and distort their representations so that we can embed them within one another, even believing them to be ‘computers’ in their own right.

We begin with the conundrum of recursion, showing how its occurrence in cities through spatial similarity at different scales, leads to worlds within worlds. We illustrate these ideas with a large-scale digital representation of the core of a world city,London, showing how we can generate different realizations of the city for different purposes. We embed these representations within one another, building virtual worlds, moving from the material to the digital and back again, using the digital model to represent the material world in different ways, and finally printing – fabricating the model.

Our message is that digital representation opens a cornucopia of possibilities in representation and communication through a variety of devices which in turn can be embedded in the city, Escher-like, and which indeed are rapidly becoming the city.

You can download the paper here (1047Kb).