Research

Research

I develop geospatial methods and investigate how the organisation of places and networks shapes urban life. My research connects two aims: advancing the ways we represent and analyse geographical relationships, and understanding how urban form and infrastructure relate to access, economic activity and collective life.

Working with students and collaborators, I bring together geographical information science, GeoAI, spatial modelling and urban research. My work spans neighbourhoods, cities and regions, connecting fine-grained geographical evidence with broader questions about how cities develop and function.

Geospatial methods and computing

How can computational methods represent geographical relationships more effectively?

Distance, connectivity, context and scale influence what we can learn from geographical data. My methodological research examines how these relationships can inform spatial measurement, statistical modelling and machine learning.

Recent collaborative work investigates how geographical context can be incorporated into models for spatial tabular data. Alongside model development, I am interested in how methods perform across geographical settings, how their results can be interpreted, and how computational efficiency can support wider research use. These questions connect GeoAI with a broader programme of geospatial computing.

Selected research

GeoAggregator — AAAI, 2025. A transformer model that incorporates spatial relationships into learning from geospatial tabular data.
TabPFN-GSA — International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2026. An investigation of TabPFN for geospatial prediction, introducing geospatial sparse attention to select relevant observations for prediction.
Graph convolutional networks for street network analysis — International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2024. A graph-learning approach that represents local and global street-network structure, demonstrated through urban polycentricity prediction across Chinese cities.
Machine learning-based characterisation of urban morphology with the street pattern — Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 2024. An approach combining street-based local areas, network metrics and hierarchical clustering to identify diverse street patterns across cities.
Measuring polycentric urban development with multi-temporal Sentinel-1 SAR imagery — International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 2023. Methods for filtering radar imagery and detecting urban changes relevant to the measurement of polycentric development.
Understanding the protection of privacy when counting subway travelers through anonymization — Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 2024. An evaluation and adaptation of detection k-anonymity for passenger-flow analysis, examining the balance between privacy protection and analytical usefulness.

Urban form, infrastructure and everyday life

How does the arrangement of urban centres, networks and facilities relate to the opportunities available to people?

My research examines urban organisation across spatial scales. Work on polycentric development investigates how the distribution and connectivity of urban centres relate to economic, social and environmental outcomes. At finer scales, I examine relationships between the built environment, mobility, accessibility and collective behaviour.

Infrastructure provides a growing focus for this work. I understand it as the networks, facilities, places and organisational arrangements that enable urban activities and sustain collective life. This encompasses transport and digital networks, alongside the services and shared spaces that support social and cultural activity.

Across these studies, I connect the physical organisation of cities with questions about what places enable people to do, who benefits, and where access remains uneven.

Selected research

Urban pattern language — Cities, 2025. A framework for examining how urban morphology is organised across spatial scales.
Where England’s cities are growing — Habitat International, 2025. Building-footprint data and explainable machine learning reveal patterns of urban growth and their socioeconomic associations.
“Local hubs and global gateways”: Singapore’s master plan and urban polycentricity — Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2025. Spatial interaction scenarios examine how planned development could reshape the relationships between urban centres.
A multi-level spatial assessment framework for identifying land use conflict zones — Land Use Policy, 2025. An assessment framework identifies competing ecological, agricultural and urban land-use priorities and maps conflict zones across China.
Life between buildings: neighbourhood organisational vitality — Urban Studies, 2021. Street-view imagery and spatial analysis examine relationships between the built environment and the survival of neighbourhood social organisations in Amsterdam.
Polycentric urban development and economic productivity in China — Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2019. A multiscale analysis examines how urban spatial structure relates to productivity within cities and across city-regions.

Geospatial methods and computing

Selected research

Urban form, infrastructure and everyday life

Selected research

Mission and vision

Mission

Vision

Projects and funding

Current and recent awards

GeoAI-enabled workflows for decision-ready infrastructure evidence

Resilience of Anthropocene Coasts and Communities — RACC

NEBCommonS: UK-EU Consortium Building for ‘Impact of Common Spaces’ Horizon Europe Bid

Data4City: Collaborative Analytics for Sustainable Urban Futures

Coastal urban activities and marine ecosystems

The Spatial Segregation of Neighborhood Organizations and Entrepreneurs: Connecting Urban Inequality to the Built Environment

Measuring Pedestrian Dynamics: Doing It the Right Way

PartiCIVIS

SAFARI — Solid and Fluid Regime Transition of Granular Materials

Software and data

GeoAggregator

TabPFN-GSA

Glasgow traffic-flow dataset

Funders and collaborators