Category Archives: Technology

Counting Machines

#PlannersTweet: Learning how planning and planners use(s) Twitter

Inspired by my friend Raul Pacheco-Vega’s recent use of Twitter to encourage scholars to talk about their research, I’d like to get planning researchers and practitioners talking a little bit about what they get from using Twitter. There’s always been a lot of misperceptions — that Twitter is only for reading headlines, sharing what you [...]

Will the smarter city be built by love?

Source: ekosystem.org Jack Mason, an IBMer working on the IBM Smarter Cities Tumblr, wrote a couple weeks ago: As an IBMer working on Smarter Cities — and a New Yorker for much of my adult life — I’d like to observe that Adam Greenfield doesn’t know me, my motivations, or those of the thousands of [...]

Convening a conversation between Usability and Planning Professionals

Summary (aka tl;dr) World Usability Day and World Town Planning Day are two events celebrated very close together, in the first week of November. I propose having a joint project or event to lay the groundwork for conversation between urban planners and user experience practitioners, and the insights each can bring for navigating the urban [...]

Awkward as Planned: short-term pain for long-term Olympic Legacy?

Richard Layman linked to a recent post to a PriceWaterhouseCooper report on how Olympic or other mega-event legacy infrastructure can accelerate development by up to 30 years. He comments on how good planning is a big part of leveraging these opportunities into longer-term wins for the communities: Much of the time, events or projects for [...]

Some thoughts on last night

We watched. We watched on TV. A camera perched somewhere high above the street showed us the scene at the Fanzone on Georgia Street. Wall-to-wall people. We’re glad we’re not there, we murmured. It was game 5 of the Stanley Playoffs, in Vancouver. I was at the Hurricane Grill in Yaletown — the first bar [...]

The Crowdsourced City: at SFU City Program, and Open Gov West 2011

Some late reflections on The Crowdsourced City, which describes two things: first, it was an event at SFU Vancouver on May 10th; I then repurposed it as the departure point for an unconference I proposed and led at Open Gov West 2011 in Portland on May 14th. CrowdSourced City: the SFU City Presentation This event [...]

Conversations in Boston at APA2011 and beyond

I’ve been back in Vancouver for just about 48 hours now — enough time to get a little distance without being too far away from the conversations I had at this year’s American Planning Association conference. While I often look back and think that the event is really intense and overwhelming — especially since it [...]

APA Conference 2011: Internships and Open Government

I’m nearing the end of my layover in Chicago in the last leg of my journey to Boston. It’s been a strenuous 24 hours or so, crossing timezones and working on assignments, but I know this will all be worth it as, in but a few hours, I will be attending PlanningTech@DUSP, and in the [...]