About five years ago, I was invited to join a group of researchers who planned to undertake a smart mobility research project in partnership with community stakeholders in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Unlike in much of my prior research on scenario planning which relies on learning from professional practice, in this project I had the opportunity […]
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 […]
New Publication: “Scenario Planning for Slow-Growing Regions”
Many urban regions outside of booming metros experience “sprawl without growth” — where the urban core loses population and new sprawl development is added at the fringe even as the overall regional population remains stable (or even declines). Thus far the planning field didn’t have a great way to model scenarios for this situation. Together […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]