What’s the relationship between sprawling urban form, urban forest cover, and racial diversity? Can communities maintain racial diversity, or both grow denser and greener, in a broader context of regional sprawl? Surprisingly, there are few studies on these questions, since most urban sprawl research lacks fine-grain data about urban forests, which requires complex remote sensing […]
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 […]
Register Now for 9/26 Urban Informatics Ann Arbor Unconference
I’m pleased to announce an unconference planned for 9:30 am – 4:00 pm on Saturday, Sept. 26th, in the Art & Architecture Building at the University of Michigan North Campus. Urban informatics is an interdisciplinary field of researchers and practitioners interested in using information technology for the analysis, management, and planning of cities. It encompasses […]
Applying Geospatial Crowdsourcing to Cities
Later this month I’ll be traveling to the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario to participate in the GeoThink Summer Institute. The event will focus on crowdsourcing, and I will be joined by Daren Brabham (University of Southern California), Monica Stephens (SUNY Buffalo), and Renee Sieber (McGill) to provide an overview of geospatial crowdsourcing, present some of […]
The Art (and Science?) of Designing Urban Planning Processes
In June I published an op-ed in the Detroit News describing my research on urban renewal in Detroit in the 1940s. I concluded with the observation: The voices of citizens affected by renewal must be heard. Dramatic, large-scale projects can have harmful and unexpected consequences. The history of urban planning has shown success occurs through […]
‘Cybernetics in City Hall’ and the Challenge of Real-Time Urban Management
Periodically I come across an old article that seems very relevant to the present, such as the article about public sector innovation I posted in January. The ongoing expanded use — and declining cost — of sensors and computing technologies has sparked a renewed interest in using them to solve persistent urban problems. A similar […]
Back to the Future for Modeling Urban Systems: Research Mirage or New Frontier?
In June I took the general exams for my PhD program, which involved a one-week written and oral test on topics related to my chosen fields — urban information systems and democratic land use planning. This means over the past year I’ve plowed through much of the literature on urban modeling from the 1950s to […]