Duncan Smith here at CASA and Andrew Crooks, an assistant professor in the Department of Computational Social Science, at George Mason University have just finished a new working paper entitled ” From Buildings to Cities: Techniques for the Multi-Scale Analysis of Urban Form and Function .” Below is the abstract : The built environment is a significant factor in many urban processes, yet direct measures of built form are seldom used in geographical studies. Representation and analysis of urban form and function could provide new insights and improve the evidence base for research. So far progress has been slow due to limited data availability, computational demands, and a lack of methods to integrate built environment data with aggregate geographical analysis.