Last fall I was honored to to receive the Donald Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice for my dissertation, Planning Support Systems for Spatial Planning Through Social Learning, at the 2014 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference in Philadelphia. Donald Schön was a longtime (1968-1997) faculty member at the MIT Department of Urban Studies […]
Present Your Urban Tech Research in Boston in 2015
In 2013 I had the pleasure of attending the 13th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM), held at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Although the conference tends to fly under the radar, the event was a true pleasure. The attendees included many scholars whose work I knew from the literature, and featured […]
New Article on Smart Cities: Moving Beyond Urban Cybernetics
In August, an article I wrote about smart cities was published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. In it, I critique the existing corporate-led smart city discourse, and discuss why smart city technologies do not eliminate the need for other types of technologies to improve cities. Here’s the title and abstract: Smart […]
Building Michigan’s Civic Tech Community
When I first heard about the Michigan Citizen Interaction Design project at Michigan’s School of Information, I knew I wanted to collaborate with the people behind it. The project is an experiment in civic technology and engaged learning, and involves teams of SI students working in partnership with the city of Jackson, Michigan to create […]
New Course: Scenario Planning Theory and Practice
This Winter 2015, I’ll be offering a new course titled “Public Sector Scenario Planning: Theory and Practice” offered as Course UP 696-003 at Michigan’s Taubman College. The course was developed with assistance from the Open Scenario Planning Tools group (in turn supported by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy and the Sonoran Institute), a group […]
Going Forward
In the past few years, the posting frequency here has been low as I finished my PhD at MIT and completed my first year as an assistant professor at Michigan. This website has evolved substantially over the years, and I’ve decided there’s no reason to stop now even though I don’t have time for longer, […]
Urban Democracy, One Click at a Time?
The Economist magazine dedicated a special section of their March 1st issue to democracy. That essay observed that two decades after the triumphant 1990s, the political ideology is facing challenges. China’s rise has shown the economic efficiency of centralized power, and Russia, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Argentina are “perpetuating a simulacrum of democracy” rather than doing […]