On Studying Planning in the Detroit Region

The building of cities is one of man’s greatest achievements. The form of his city always has been and always will be a pitiless indicator of the state of his civilization. — Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities (p. 13) This quotation, by the famous Philadelphia architect and planner Edmund Bacon, has always been one of […]

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New Library of Materials for Teaching Scenario Planning

For several years I have been a member of the Open Planning Tools Group, an innovative group of practitioners and scholars interested in scenario planning and the development and use of new planning tools. After many discussions, the group decided to take some more concrete steps to create resources for planning educators. I decided to volunteer […]

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New Project on Data Sources for Urban Health Disparities

One of my research interests is how new technologies can be used to develop new knowledge about cities, and how that knowledge can in turn be applied to make better planning decisions. Therefore I’m excited to serve as a co-principle investigator in a new research project which recently received funding from the Social Sciences Annual […]

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The Enduring Relevance of Donald Schön

Last fall I was honored to to receive the Donald Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice for my dissertation, Planning Support Systems for Spatial Planning Through Social Learning, at the 2014 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference in Philadelphia. Donald Schön was a longtime (1968-1997) faculty member at the MIT Department of Urban Studies […]

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Present Your Urban Tech Research in Boston in 2015

In 2013 I had the pleasure of attending the 13th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM), held at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Although the conference tends to fly under the radar, the event was a true pleasure. The attendees included many scholars whose work I knew from the literature, and featured […]

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Building Michigan’s Civic Tech Community

When I first heard about the Michigan Citizen Interaction Design project at Michigan’s School of Information, I knew I wanted to collaborate with the people behind it. The project is an experiment in civic technology and engaged learning, and involves teams of SI students working in partnership with the city of Jackson, Michigan to create […]

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