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 […]
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 […]
New U-M Course in Sustainability and Social Change
In the Winter 2016 term, I’ll be offering a new course at Michigan titled “How To Change the World: Sustainability and Social Change.” After developing a shared theoretical perspective about social structure, the course considers and critiques several popular change paradigms including the adoption of disruptive innovations, social entrepreneurship, and tactical urbanism. The aim of the course […]
New Journal Article: ‘Sketching and Learning: A Planning Support System Field Study’
An article containing findings from my research on social learning and GIS-based planning tools has been published by the journal Environment and Planning B, the leading journal for research on IT and analytical methods applied to urban problems. The article is titled “Sketching and learning: a planning support system field study,” and the abstract is […]