How Rioters Act Like Shoppers Shortly after the riots that
spread across London in the summer of 2011, media outlets in the
city began publishing maps trying to make sense of the event.
They ran illustrations showing the sites of the worst rioting,
as well as other maps cross-referencing the clusters of violence
with the known home addresses – using court records – of people
who’d been arrested in it. At the time, these maps struck
several researchers studying urban systems at University College
London. “We thought, ‘this is a spatial system, and it looks a
bit like something we have looked at before,’” says Toby Davies,
one of the academics. He and his colleagues were picturing, more
specifically, spatial models of how shoppers behave in search of
retail. And this got them thinking. “It looks like retail,"
Davies says, "and retail is something we know we can model.” Why
not try to mathematically model the movement of rioters? Their
research on this question, just published in the journal
Scientific Reports,