big data
The Unique 'Fingerprints' of 131 Cities
An article on big think examines a project to find the unique qualities of urban street grids as an exercise in the potential of Big Data.
Mining Data from the World for Big Profits
The Wall Street Journal examines a pair of businesses as examples of how new sources of data can be collected and sold. Orbital Insight, Inc, for instance, interprets the shadows cast by buildings.
Cities Passing Up Opportunity to Amass Uber's Valuable Data
The legalization (or illegalization) process of Uber throughout the country allows city governments to leverage a data exchange with the company, but too many municipalities are passing up this momentous opportunity.
America's Growing Data Divide
The opportunities from data-driven innovations are wide, but many communities experiencing the data divide are without access to or reporting of high-quality data, furthering them from these benefits.
The Power of Public-Private Partnerships: Mobile Phone Apps and Municipalities
Private, crowdsourced mobile phone applications addressing urban mobility collect troves of data on how cities flow. So how can municipalities tap into these databases to accurately understand the movement of their citizens?
New York City Does In Fact Sleep
Brian Wilt, a data scientist at Jawbone, the company behind many fitness trackers, aggregated sleeping patterns of people across the world to see how people's sleeping cycles compare.
Fighting Wildfires with Big Data
WIFIRE, a real-time and data-driven simulation, prediction, and visualization technology, combines satellite and remote sensor data to forecast the potential spread of wildfires.
Researchers Pull Social Media Data to Track Migration
The limitations (and inaccuracies) of traditional data sources like the U.S. Census are well known, so researchers are looking social media to gather the data necessary to draw conclusions about societal movements.
Floating Vertical Farms Could Deliver and Monitor Food Production in Dense Cities
Known for its density with nearly 20,000 people per square mile, Singapore is changing its food systems strategy to produce more food locally, and reduce food waste.
Does the 'Playable City' Improve the 'Smart City'?
Conceived as a counterpoint to the "smart city," the "playable city" would think beyond efficiency and utility in applying technology to the urban experience.
What Computer Scientists Can Teach Planners About Design
Architect Dave Hampton reviews the 2nd annual Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network workshop held June 11 in Chicago.
Can Data Help Boston Improve its Nightlife?
Boston is considering regulatory changes that would extend the hours of late night services like alcohol sales and transit. An editorial in the Boston Globe recommends a data-driven approach for deciding where to implement the nightlife experiment.
Meet Boston's New Tech-Enabled 'Pop-Up' Bus Service
A private bus service launched this week in Boston that decides service based on crowdsourced data on where and when people need to travel.
Big Data’s Victory Over Anonymity
A writer laments the advances made by data collection in cities—once a location where people could maintain or seek anonymity.
Visualizing Big Data In Your Own SimCity World
Two former Mozilla engineers strive to merge big data with a 3D model of London and, potentially, other cities.
Boston Mayor Plugs Into Big Data
New Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh has installed a large data dashboard in his office to track the performance of everything from city services, hot line call volume, and social media sentiment.
How Smart Cities Encourage Citizen Engagement
The extent to which cities will build data collection systems into the infrastructure—or how much we’ll voluntarily gather and share information from our smartphones—has yet to be determined. Here is a survey of what some cities have launched so far.
Oil and Water: Connected Cars and Privacy
Jeremy Cato pens an editorial on the dark side of connected cars—the data necessary to track and integrate so many card will allow unprecedented invasions of privacy.
The Dark Side of Big Data
In a long read for Metropolis Magazine, Alex Marshall describes the implications of the “Smart City” movement, including the risk of turning over massive data collection operations to large corporations.
Solutionism in Urban Data Science
Shannon Mattern surveys the new wave of urban data science projects and argues that practitioners are trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of method.
City of Costa Mesa
Licking County
Barrett Planning Group LLC
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Mpact Transit + Community
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Tufts University, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning
City of Universal City TX
ULI Northwest Arkansas
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
