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 […]
On Studying Planning in the Detroit Region
The building of cities is one of man’s greatest achievements. The form of his city always has been and always will be a pitiless indicator of the state of his civilization. — Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities (p. 13) This quotation, by the famous Philadelphia architect and planner Edmund Bacon, has always been one of […]
Present Your Urban Tech Research in Boston in 2015
In 2013 I had the pleasure of attending the 13th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM), held at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Although the conference tends to fly under the radar, the event was a true pleasure. The attendees included many scholars whose work I knew from the literature, and featured […]