Senior Lecturer
Spatial Modelling, Spatial Analysis, GIS Urban Change
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Qualifications
BA / MA (Cantab), MSc (Glasgow), PhD ( London )
I studied Engineering at the University of Cambridge , and worked as a professional engineer for eight years in the London area. I 'discovered' GIS by chance at a professional meeting, in an image processing magazine, in an article about the clever things the Norwegian State Mapping Agency was doing with GPS and GIS technology, and was prompted to 'go back to school'. I got my MSc and PhD degrees in quick succession and was lucky enough to land my first academic position at Penn State in 2000. The United States is an exhilarating place to live but also an unnerving one, so we moved again, arriving at the University of Auckland in 2004. With my research interests focusing on the application of GIS technologies and methods to the study of urban issues, Auckland is an exciting place to be.
Teaching
My teaching is focused on GIS and related methods. Courses I have some involvement with include:
Although the topics I teach tend to be technical ones, I try to focus students' attention on the advantages and disadvantages of the methods available for application to different problems, so that they can become not merely competent users of those methods, but critical and informed ones also.
Research Interest
My research interests are primarily in the area of dynamic simulation modelling of geographical phenomena. I am particularly interested in applications to urban change and human systems. I am particularly focused on developing approaches to simulation models that can capture the complexity of how human actors in urban systems perceive their surroundings.
For example, in many urban simulation models the city is represented as a grid of cells, and change occurs with respect to the characteristics of grid cells and their immediate 4 (or 8) neighbouring cells in the grid. This is an unsatisfactory way to represent urban systems however. In current work, I am developing the idea of neighbourhoods to include more complex basic units (such as city blocks, land parcels, school zones, etc.) and the complicated spatial relationships among them. In time, I hope that simulations using this sort of framework will enable us to understand better the effects on urban change of how neighbourhoods are defined and perceived. A prime example is the role that the changing perception of a neighbourhood has on the process of gentrification.
I have worked in the past with cellular automata models, but have recently become more interested in agent-based models. Agent-based models are particularly appropriate for studying phenomena such as urban property markets, residential segregation by race, ethnicity and class, transportation problems, and health.
All of this work is set within two broader themes that interest me:
First, is the potential impact of ideas from 'complexity science' on an interdisciplinary field such as geography. Complexity science focuses attention on many characteristic behaviours of dynamic systems such as self-organization, emergence, path dependence, sensitivity to initial conditions, and so on, which had previously been ignored or 'simplified' out of existence in science. Geographers, on the other hand, have long recognized these phenomena. I therefore feel that there is room for productive exchanges between geographers of all persuasions (human, physical, qualitative, quantitative) and complexity studies more generally.
Second, and related to the previous theme, is the importance of understanding the role of simulation models in contemporary science. Models play an increasingly important role in understanding the behaviour of the complex interconnected social, ecological and physical environments in which we live. Therefore, it is important that we understand both the limitations and potential of simulation models as decision-making tools.
O'Sullivan, D. 2004. Complexity science and human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 29(3), 282–95.
Reardon, S. F. and D. O’Sullivan. 2004. Measures of Spatial Segregation. Sociological Methodology, 34(1), 121–62.
O’Sullivan, D. 2004. Too much of the wrong kind of data: implications for the practice of micro-scale spatial modelling. In M. F. Goodchild and D. Janelle (eds), Spatially Integrated Social Science: Examples of Best Practice (Oxford University Press: Oxford ), pages 95–107.
O’Sullivan, D. and D. J. Unwin. 2003. Geographic Information Analysis (Wiley: Hoboken , NJ ).
O'Sullivan, D. 2002. Toward micro-scale spatial modelling of gentrification. Journal of Geographical Systems, 4(3), 251–74.
O'Sullivan, D. 2001. Graph-cellular automata: a generalised discrete urban and regional model. Environment and Planning B: Planning & Design, 28(5), 687–705.
Haklay, M., T. Schelhorn, D. O'Sullivan, and M. Thurstain-Goodwin. 2001. "So go down town": Simulating pedestrian movement in town centres. Environment and Planning B: Planning & Design, 28(3), 343–59.
Torrens , P. T. and D. O'Sullivan, 2001. Cellular automata and urban simulation: where do we go from here? Environment and Planning B: Planning & Design, 28(2), 163–68.
O'Sullivan, D. and A. Turner. 2001. Visibility graphs and landscape visibility analysis. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15(3), 221–37.
Turner, A., M. Doxa, D. O'Sullivan, and A. Penn. 2001. From isovists to visibility graphs: a methodology for the analysis of architectural space. Environment and Planning B: Planning & Design, 28(1), 103–21.
O'Sullivan, D. and P. M. Torrens. 2001. Cellular models of urban systems. In S. Bandini and T. Worsch (eds), Theoretical and Practical Issues on Cellular Automata, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry (ACRI 2000), October 4–6, Karlsruhe, Germany (Springer-Verlag: London), pages 108–16.
O'Sullivan, D. 2001. Exploring spatial process dynamics using irregular cellular automaton models. Geographical Analysis, 33(1), 1–18.
O'Sullivan, D. and M. Haklay. 2000. Agent-based models and individualism: is the world agent-based? Environment and Planning A, 32(8), 1409–25.
O'Sullivan, D., A. Morrison, and J. Shearer. 2000. Using desktop GIS for the investigation of accessibility by public transport: an isochrone approach. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 14(1), 85–104.