How can a region create a shared technical infrastructure for planning? In order to find out, together with a student research assistant Cassie Hackel, I conducted an exploratory study of an effort to build such a system in Southern California. Here is the abstract of the paper which resulted from our research project: Although planning […]
New Book Chapter: ‘Crowdsourcing street beauty: Visual preference surveys in the big data era’
I contributed a chapter to the newly-released book, Big Data for Regional Science (eds. Laurie A. Schintler, Zhenhua Chen), on new methods for conducting urban visual preferences research. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction: Aesthetic preferences for landscapes have been studied by researchers in many fields, given the importance of the issue to human well-being, […]
New Article: ‘Using Social Media to Identify Sources of Healthy Food in Urban Neighborhoods’
This paper resulted from an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Michigan focused on data sources and techniques for analyzing neighborhood effects on urban health. Here’s the abstract: An established body of research has used secondary data sources (such as proprietary business databases) to demonstrate the importance of the neighborhood food environment for multiple […]
Registration Open for Urban Informatics Unconference
Together with collaborators at the UM School of Information, I am helping organize another Urban Informatics Unconference this fall, to be held from noon-5pm on Friday, October 20th. Here’s some more information: Urban informatics is an interdisciplinary field of research and practice that uses information technology for the analysis, management, planning, design, inhabitation, and usability […]
New U-M Course in Urban Informatics
University of Michigan students can register now for a new Fall 2017 course I am offering, Introduction to Urban Informatics (URP 535). The course description is below, please contact me with any questions. URP 535: Introduction to Urban Informatics Fall 2017, Tues/Thurs 1-2:30 PM, Room 2210 Art & Arch. Building Prof. Robert Goodspeed (rgoodspe at umich.edu) […]
New Comment: ‘Community and Urban Places in a Digital World’
I took the opportunity to consider how technology is transforming the relationship between community and urban place in a recent contribution to the Symposium section of the journal City & Community. Here is the abstract: The sources of big data of most interest to urban social researchers arise from the adoption of digital information and communications technologies […]
New Commentary: ‘The Death and Life of Collaborative Planning Theory’
I recently published a commentary in the open access journal Urban Planning, which will appear in a forthcoming special issue on “Paradigm Shifts in Urban Planning.” The commentary’s title is a reference to Jane Jacobs’s famous book, and while several articles have used a similar formulation, I realized only after the article went to press that […]