Technology

Planners are futurists, but with less pretension and jargon. Our work requires predicting how current trends are likely to affect future conditions and activities, and how communities should prepare. For example, let's predict self-driving cars.

August 16, 2013 - Todd Litman

Explore how people across the world are working to develop technology enhanced solutions to challenges facing their cities.

May 27, 2013 - Jennifer Evans-Cowley

Tom Sanchez (Virginia Tech) and I decided to offer a free course to a global audience. The response has been phenomenal with more than 17,000 people participating. Learn about what the globe has to say about technology in cities.

April 27, 2013 - Jennifer Evans-Cowley

For my annual update of the apps that support planning I've compiled a list of the latest applications for sharing information, visualizations, sensing, predicting, supporting decision making, crowdsourcing, and engaging.

January 25, 2013 - Jennifer Evans-Cowley

Course explores how the increasing availability of networks, sensors and mobile technologies allows for new approaches to address the challenges that our cities face.

November 22, 2012 - Jennifer Evans-Cowley

A free digital toolkit allowing communities to collect, analyze, and share their own data will be launched nationally at the end of the year.

October 11, 2012 - Fast Company Co.Design

Rapid urbanization in India will create unplanned cities with poor quality of life unless steps are taken to integrate urban design and planning with governance structures, and primitive planning methods are revamped with the latest technology.

September 23, 2012 - Hindustan Times

David Kilcullen creates maps to empower disenfranchised people in developing countries around the world. By combining social science and technology his firm solves tough problems in "frontier environments," reports David Holmes.

August 1, 2012 - Fast Company

Teresa Burney reports on PulteGroup's new marketing services geared towards understanding the Gen Y demographic as new potential homeowners.

July 11, 2012 - Builder

Brent Toderian, recently the planning director for Vancouver, was interviewed by Denmark's Sustainable Cities about technology and planning. Toderian was contrarian when it came to technology's ability to save the world.

June 28, 2012 - Sustainable Cities

Landowners with fewer apartments units are starting to use software similar for pricing airline tickets and hotel vacancies to determine rental rates for their properties, reports Matt Hudgins for The New York Times.

November 30, 2011 - The New York Times

With the proliferation of new media planning practitioners have new ways to find out about the continuing work of planning faculty members who have retired. Not all of them blog of course, but the list below demonstrates some of the variety of these efforts.

October 24, 2011 - Ann Forsyth

Providing wifi on public transit and encouraging people to Check In with their smart phones are two of the three examples cities could implement to bring people closer together.

July 1, 2011 - Mashable

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NY's "Chief Digital Officer" Rachel Sterne presented plans to use enhance technology that connects citizens with their government.

May 24, 2011 - SeeClickFix Blog

Planetizen founding Editor Chris Steins offers his evaluation of the top 25 thinkers at the intersection of planning and technology.

April 26, 2011 - Chris Steins

Livejournal has posted a series of paintings that ran as part of a 1961 Motorola advertising campaign that depict a futuristic lifestyle and featuring cavernous modern living spaces.

March 28, 2011 - Livejournal

The Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development made over 16,000 observations of portable tech usage on airplains, trains, and buses. Their findings show that there is a increase of tech use on transit, but usage is reliant on users having space.

March 23, 2011 - TransportationNation.Org

In 2009 we worked with Ron Thomas, Mary Means, and Goody Clancy to help plan and run a large 500+ person visioning event in the town of Shreveport. We set up the event the night before with computers at every table for brainstorming and a [...]

March 19, 2011 - Ken Snyder

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced yesterday that the city will begin to utilize QR (quick response) codes on all building permits, providing more access to information for New York residents.

February 23, 2011 - TechCrunch

"Intelligent cities" is picking up steam as the new buzzword in planning and a potentially game-changing way of using data to drive decisions. But we need to be sure we don't lose the human intelligence in planning.

February 13, 2011 - Next American City