I just posted a new article on the Planetizen blog: “The Coming Urban Data Revolution“: Historically, data sources for urban planning have remained relatively stable. Planners relied on a collection of well-known government-produced datasets to do their work, including statistics and geographic layers from federal, state and local sources. Produced by regulatory processes or occasional […]
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 […]
Bike Sharing Coming to Boston: What Infrastructure Is Needed?
Boston has been slow to join the urban bicycling renaissance. In this very strong-mayor city, Mayor Menino had a public about-face in 2007. After long neglecting bicyclists in the city, he hired a “bike czar” and the city began implementing bike racks and lanes. The mayor himself even bought a bike for neighborhood rides. With […]
How Should Detroit Plan for the Future?
The Detroit News published an op-ed I wrote about lessons learned about urban renewal from my undergraduate thesis. Detroit is facing big problems: declining population, budget deficits and a stagnant economy. Discussions about fixing the city has generated dramatic ideas, including the Detroit Works Project — Mayor Bing’s roadmap for the city’s future. The plan […]
New ‘Planning and Technology Today’ Out for APA Conference
The Spring issue of the newsletter of the the Technology Division of the American Planning Association, which I edit, was just published. The issue was timed to coincide with the American Planning Association conference here in Boston next week. The issue includes articles on the following topics: Technology-related sessions at the APA conference Social media […]
The Problems With ‘Platforms’
It seems that every day the word ‘platform’ becomes more ingrained in the way we think about online tools to do good and address public problems. The ubiquity of the term may be due to its fundamental ambiguity, which it shares with other terms like ‘sustainability’ and ‘participation.’ In an incisive article on the subject […]
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