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, […]
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 […]
New Article: ‘Digital Knowledge Technologies in Planning Practice: from Black Boxes to Media for Collaborative Inquiry’
Urban planning technologies are typically conceptualized in positivist terms, which results in a troubling gap between the assumptions of analytical tools and community concerns. Building on ideas from my dissertation, I address this gap in a recent theoretical article appearing in the journal Planning Theory & Practice. Here’s the abstract: Digital knowledge technologies such as […]