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 […]
Book Review: The Well-Tempered City
The complexity of cities have posed a challenge to all who choose to write about them in a comprehensive way. On the one hand, this can result in lengthy books which draw their authors across a vast intellectual terrain. Patrick Geddes’s Cities in Evolution exceeds 400 pages, and the paperback edition of Lewis Mumford’s magnum opus The City […]
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 […]
Register now for #micities 2016, Sat., Oct. 8
Together with some great collaborators at the UM School of Information, I’m helping with another edition of the #micities, a one-day conference planned for Saturday, October 8th in Ann Arbor, MI. First held in 2014, this event focuses on the impact of new information technologies on cities, including topics like digital participation, civic technology, smart cities, […]
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 […]
Review: Sadik-Khan’s Streetfight
Cities are complex, so they can be easily seen in different ways. The same urban block can be viewed as blighted, sustainable, congested, or a historic asset—all depending on who you ask. The fundamental importance seeing means that at the heart of graduate programs in urban planning are courses in observation—sometimes called “research methods”—the survey, the […]
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 […]