Category: Research

Overcoming Obstacles to Scenario Planning

Over the last couple of years, I’ve presented about my book, Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertain Futures many times. While preparing a presentation for the Inter-American Development Bank’s Regional Policy Dialog, I began to reflect on what obstacles face practitioners seeking to introduce scenario planning in their local contexts. As […]

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New Article Presents a Spatial Model for Prioritizing Green Infrastructure Locations

There is a lot of interest in green infrastructure in cities, which can refer to a variety of landscape elements like trees, swales, parks, and conservation areas, for fostering environmental quality, mitigating the urban heat island effect, and reducing stormwater runoff. However, there is a lack of methods for identifying which locations to prioritize for […]

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New Paper Analyzes Eviction Cases Across Michigan

Last year I completed a research project on evictions in Michigan, conducted in collaboration with attorney Libby Benton and others at the Michigan Advocacy Project, a legal aid organization. This page summarizes the project, which resulted in a report and policy brief, released in May 2020. Today the academic paper produced by this project, “Eviction […]

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New Article: ‘An alternative to slow transit, drunk driving, and walking in bad weather: An exploratory study of ridesourcing mode choice and demand’

Based on the number of vehicles with Uber and Lyft stickers on them I’ve seen around Ann Arbor, it’s obvious that ridesourcing (or ridesharing) has become a significant transportation mode even in small cities. But given the difficulty of obtaining data from these companies, how can we study this important new phenomenon? I decided to […]

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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 […]

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