Boston’s subway plays a critical role for the city. Despite a fare increase in 2007 and receiving a dedicated portion of the state’s sales tax, in recent years the agency’s tight budget (driven partly by labor, health care, and energy costs) has prevented needed maintenance and upgrades. With many of the system’s cars nearing the […]
How Open are Massachusetts Municipal Data?
My first peer-reviewed journal article was published this month by the Journal of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), an open access journal published by a leading geographic information systems (GIS) professional organization. Titled “From Public Records to Open Government: Access to Massachusetts Municipal Geographic Data,” it reports the result of a public […]
The Art (and Science?) of Designing Urban Planning Processes
In June I published an op-ed in the Detroit News describing my research on urban renewal in Detroit in the 1940s. I concluded with the observation: The voices of citizens affected by renewal must be heard. Dramatic, large-scale projects can have harmful and unexpected consequences. The history of urban planning has shown success occurs through […]
‘Cybernetics in City Hall’ and the Challenge of Real-Time Urban Management
Periodically I come across an old article that seems very relevant to the present, such as the article about public sector innovation I posted in January. The ongoing expanded use — and declining cost — of sensors and computing technologies has sparked a renewed interest in using them to solve persistent urban problems. A similar […]
New Planetizen Post: The Coming Urban Data Revolution
I just posted a new article on the Planetizen blog: “The Coming Urban Data Revolution“: Historically, data sources for urban planning have remained relatively stable. Planners relied on a collection of well-known government-produced datasets to do their work, including statistics and geographic layers from federal, state and local sources. Produced by regulatory processes or occasional […]
Back to the Future for Modeling Urban Systems: Research Mirage or New Frontier?
In June I took the general exams for my PhD program, which involved a one-week written and oral test on topics related to my chosen fields — urban information systems and democratic land use planning. This means over the past year I’ve plowed through much of the literature on urban modeling from the 1950s to […]
Bike Sharing Coming to Boston: What Infrastructure Is Needed?
Boston has been slow to join the urban bicycling renaissance. In this very strong-mayor city, Mayor Menino had a public about-face in 2007. After long neglecting bicyclists in the city, he hired a “bike czar” and the city began implementing bike racks and lanes. The mayor himself even bought a bike for neighborhood rides. With […]