Based on the number of vehicles with Uber and Lyft stickers on them I’ve seen around Ann Arbor, it’s obvious that ridesourcing (or ridesharing) has become a significant transportation mode even in small cities. But given the difficulty of obtaining data from these companies, how can we study this important new phenomenon? I decided to […]
New Article on the Analysis of Crowdsourced Visual Survey Data
New websites such as StreetSeen at The Ohio State University or Place Pulse at the MIT Media Lab use crowdsourcing to analyze urban landscapes by showing visitors a large number of paired Google Street View images, and asking them to pick the image which rates higher on the characteristic of interest (such as beauty, liveliness, walkability, etc). In a Research […]
Building Better Information Tools for Environmental Management and Planning
Expanding access to high-quality data, geographic information systems (GIS), and web-based mapping technology have resulted in an ever-expanding collection of information tools for professionals working in professional fields like urban and environmental planning and management. While these tools hold great promise for improving professional practice, and a large number of have been created, their adoption has […]
Key Questions for Civic Crowdfunding
I have begun developing a research collaboration with Katie Lorah from the civic crowdfunding organization ioby. We’ve decided to “think out loud,” and share some of our early thoughts about civic crowdfunding in an article published yesterday on Planetizen titled “More Than Money: Civic Crowdfunding for Participatory Community Development.” In the article we discuss three possible […]
Edited Volume on Planning Support Systems and Smart Cities
My new edited volume, titled Planning Support Systems and Smart Cities, is now available online through Springer. The book features peer-reviewed papers which will be presented at the 14th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM 2015), a conference to be held at MIT in Boston on July 7-10, 2015. The book is co-edited by […]
New Project on Data Sources for Urban Health Disparities
One of my research interests is how new technologies can be used to develop new knowledge about cities, and how that knowledge can in turn be applied to make better planning decisions. Therefore I’m excited to serve as a co-principle investigator in a new research project which recently received funding from the Social Sciences Annual […]