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 […]
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 […]